Silo

A silo (from the Greek σιρός – siros, "pit for holding grain") is a structure for storing bulk materials. Silos are used in agriculture to store grain (see grain elevators) or fermented feed known as silage. Silos are more commonly used for bulk storage of grain, coal, cement, carbon black, woodchips, food products and sawdust. Three types of silos are in widespread use today: tower silos, bunker silos, and bag silos.

Types of silos

Cement storage silos

There are different types of cement silos such as the low-level mobile silo and the static upright cement silo, which are used to hold and discharge cement and other powder materials such as PFA (Pulverised Fuel Ash). The low-level silos are fully mobile with capacities from 10 to 75 tons. They are simple to transport and are easy to set up on site. These mobile silos generally come equipped with an electronic weighing system with digital display and printer. This allows any quantity of cement or powder discharged from the silo to be controlled and also provides an accurate indication of what remains inside the silo. The static upright silos have capacities from 20 to 80 tons. These are considered a low-maintenance option for the storage of cement or other powders. Cement silos can be used in conjunction with bin-fed batching plants.

Silo (library)

Silo is a computer data format and library developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for storing rectilinear, curvilinear, unstructured, or point meshes in 2D and 3D. It supports data upon those meshes, including scalar, vector, and tensor variables; volume fraction-based materials; and mass fraction-based species. It fully supports block structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) meshes by way of mesh blocks structured in a hierarchy. Silo sits on top of other low-level storage libraries such as PDB, NetCDF, and HDF5.

Currently, VisIt, an open source software package with its start at LLNL, supports the Silo format for visualization and analysis, among many other formats.

As of Version 4.8, July, 2010, the Silo source code is now available under the standard BSD Open Source License.

The source code for two compression libraries which have been part of previous releases of the Silo library is not available under the terms of the BSD Open Source license. These are the Hzip and FPzip compression libraries.

Mario Rodríguez Cobos

Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos, also known by the mononym Silo (6 January 1938 – 16 September 2010), was an Argentine writer and founder of the Humanist Movement.

An active speaker, he wrote books, short stories, articles and studies related to politics, society, psychology, spirituality and other topics. Although he described himself simply as a writer, many see him as a thinker, based on the diversity of issues about which he has written.

Biography

Silo was born into a middle-class family of Spanish origin in Mendoza, Argentina. His father was winemaker Rafael Rodriguez and his mother Maria Luisa Cobos, a Basque, and a music teacher. He was the youngest of three children, with siblings Raquel and Guillermo. He undertook primary and secondary education with the Maristas Brotherhood achieving excellent grades, while practising gymnastics and specializing in the pommel horse and reaching high positions in the regional rankings. In addition he was involved in various youth organizations and lead a very active social and intellectual life. He carried out special studies, in languages including French and Italian, and philosophy. He also published articles in cultural magazines.