Challenge
A large steel pelletising operation has multiple piles spread over a peninsula of land that is upwind of a popular tourist and residential beachfront area. The site environmental team developed an integrated dust control approach involving wind fences and a number of other improvements. A key to the success of their plan was to find a wind fence system that would control the wind to the levels needed to allow the total plan to work.
Solution
As a first stage, one smaller pile was chosen for an in depth evaluation. The unsheltered pile was studied in some detail over a period of months with instrumentation measuring dust loss and a wide variety of environmental and operational factors. At the same time a matching CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) study was undertaken to model the pile, validate the model, then use it to predict the optimum wind fence configuration. WeatherSolve was chosen because of it’s uniquely economical and practical design as well as it’s complete range of wind-tunnel certified aerodynamic porosities.
With the aerodynamic design complete, the fence was erected and the now sheltered pile carefully studied using the same instrumentation. The end result was that the measured fence effectiveness of 77% matched the predicted effectiveness within 5%. Some small refinements were made to the model, then the CFD study was extended to cover most of the site. From that study several more kilometers of WeatherSolve wind fences ranging up to 28m high were designed and installed.
