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Need some ideas for an oil-grit separator type system to catch soybean meal dust

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beej67

Civil/Environmental
May 13, 2009
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The site is an industrial scale meal loadout facility. They transfer soy beans and soy bean meal to trucks to be distributed to chicken and hog farms. The transfer hoppers are in a metal shed building on a concrete slab with basically no slope, and the pavement into and out of the building has very little slope on it as well. The only catch basin nearby is very shallow and cannot be deepened due to site constraints. The building catches meal dust, and the client needs to pressure wash the dust regularly, but it creates a maintenance problem because the meal dust runs off.

The project is to build a properly traffic rated, heavy duty trench drain system, in concert with busting up the pavement and repaving with enough cross slope to where the pad inside and around the building drains properly. The client would like to have some kind of interceptor between the trench drains and the inlet, to catch as much meal dust as possible during washdown. There aren't any NPDES concerns because the site ultimately drains to a stormwater spill containment pond which receives adequate treatment, but they'd like to catch this material before it gets there if possible.

The problem is we only have about 18 inches of cover to work with at the inlet, so the trench drains must basically run the entire distance to the inlet. Not enough cover for a pipe.

So I want to put in an oil grit separator, or grease trap, of some kind in-line that has a 1 ft deep trench drain in, and another 1 ft deep trench drain out, that will catch surface particulates, many of which will likely be floating, some of which might not be. Any good ideas on how to design this? Any precast options that come to mind? How would you folks do it?



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
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This could do with a drawing or section sketch to show what depth is available or not.

As far as I can figure out you are looking at something between an inlet? to a trench drain?

~how much space and depth do you have for the interceptor?
how could you remove any material, either floating or sunk?
Do you have power you can use to power any pumps or machinery?

Otherwise it sounds like a very shallow interceptor with weirs and dividers to catch the surface material, but not sure how you collect and remove it.

Run it through a cyclone?

Pump the water into something like this?
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Here's a screenshot of a concept I was working with, trying to cram the flow through a Crystal Streams Technologies unit:

screenshot_jdazli.png


You can see my inflow and outflow inverts are very constrained. I think something like that might work, but when I broached the idea with CST they got cold feet and decided they didn't think their unit could work. I'm considering just running it through a standard grease trap, but those often need a bit of fall through them to work properly, and designing these things is not my area of expertise. The six inch box top is a problem. I'm thinking about trying to brew something up with a lightweight grate on top with hinges, and then surround it with bollards so a vehicle doesn't fall into it.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
The lack of fall is an issue alright. Not much to make it work properly.

You sure you can't put some sort of sump pump in there? Then you can drop it lower and get the beam in place plus more drop to get separation.

Sump pumps are pretty cheap.

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
 
My concern is this thing catches about three quarters of an acre of impervious runoff as well, so if I did a sump or such it would need to have a stormwater bypass figured out as well.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
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