Figure showing the proposes cement plant and material flow

The Relevance of systems engineering to handling bulk materials
Projects dealing with bulk material handling are in most circumstances inter-disciplinary, complex and large. System Engineering, as a tool for design and management is normally used for building and designing systems which are complete in order to avoid difficulties that such projects may face. This is because it translates the needs of the client from past experiences or business objectives into specific system specifications. For the whole project to succeed, it normally involves four principles.
One of first principles is top-down design which involves the splitting of a complex system into smaller subsystems through the use of its components. The reason of doing this is to be able to deliver through pipeline, two million tones of limestone to a cement plant that is located 78 kilometers away to manufacture cement. Even though the whole process may appear to be complicated, breaking it into subsystems makes it to be a little easier. Some of the subsystems include (a) Grinding or Crushing of limestone into desirable shapes and sizes for easy transportation. (b) Mixing water with the limestone and pumping the slurry through the pipeline. (c) The slurry is then ridded of water and dried to be used at the receiving terminal. These processes therefore make it easy for the subsystems to be designed.
The Bottom up integration approach is the second principle of system design in which complex and large systems are built through completing and establishment of low level components alongside moving of each level at a time. The approach is advantageous because it adequately addresses minute details of the project and therefore reducing the number of bugs that the project may have. For instance, pumps and pipelines selected should always be of high quality standards before being installed into the pumping sub-system. The combination of these systems together with the crushing systems makes it to be well integrated and therefore to easily achieve its intended objective.
The system Life Cycle is the third principle of system design and it comprises of systematic stages from the concept, designing, implementation, operation of the system, maintaining of the system and finally when the system is disposed. All the above mentioned stages will normally have their own life cycle. This therefore greatly demystifies how each small component of the system easily fits in it and therefore easily helping to split the complex ad large conceptual processes and procedures into easily manageable smaller chunks.
User perspective is the last relevance of system engineering and it involves the needs and wants of the user like for instance in transporting two million t/a of limestone to the processing cement plant. In order to satisfy the needs of the customers, system engineering is used so as to perform a complex project. The design of the system involves the services of all the users thus ...