Boost your process quality

Gas Analytics is central to a wide range of applications in the cement industry and its importance cannot be underestimated. 

Whether it’s process optimization, health and safety concerns or environment protection, Siemens offers a wide range of gas analysis solutions to deal with these important issues.

The advent of emissions trading schemes and tighter regulatory standards has added to the importance of accurate gas analysis. Monitoring exhaust gases leaving the stack is necessary for both process optimisation and regulatory compliance reasons.

The range of local, national and international compliance requirements means that, where secondary fuels are used, companies must be able to monitor a wide range of gases, such as CO, NOX, SO2, O2 and dust as well as HCI, HF, Hg and THC.

When it comes to safety, time is extremely critical. In the areas in a cement plant where explosions or self-ignition of coal are a potential hazard, a fast and reliable measurement of CO or oxygen is necessary.

Traditional continuous gas analyzers have a sampling system that results in a significant time delay. Therefore, thresholds to trip bag filters and electrostatic precipitators or to add inert gas into coal silos are set with a high margin.

An in-situ laser analyzer has no time delay. It reacts immediately, and this allows thresholds to be set higher. The result is less trips of ESP’s and bag filters and the reduction of costly nitrogen in the coal silos.

A big challenge for cement producers is to keep the production costs as low. Not an easy task when you need to heat raw materials to a very high temperature to produce clinker. The cost of coal and fuel is always on the rise and most plants us a big variety of fuels and waste materials for the kiln which makes it even harder to control the burning process.

Continuous gas analyzers at critical locations can contribute massively to the optimization of the cement process and significantly reduce the production costs.

With the installation of pressure transmitters throughout the baghouse and the preheater, for example, the plant can significantly extend the life expectancy of the filter bags within the filtration plant. This also ensures that the preheater is operating at optimum efficiency.

SITRANS P comprises a complete range for measuring relative, differential and absolute pressure. In addition to high measuring precision and ruggedness, defining features include the convenience and functionality of the modular system as well as perfect safety. 

Fluctuations in temperature provide an early indication of variations in process conditions. Temperature variations should be monitored continuously, not just to maintain product quality but also to avoid damage to production equipment.

SITRANS T with communication capability offers true temperature measurements under extreme conditions – at points such as the preheater tower, the kiln, the clinker cooler, the coal mill, electrostatic precipitator and clinker silo.

At the end of the cement production, clinker is ground together with additives such as gypsum, slag and lime to form finished cement, at the same time increasing the efficiency of the grinding process and reducing energy consumption.

For accurate and reliable dosing of cement additives, SITRANS F comprises a wide selection of electromagnetic, Coriolis, ultrasonic, vortex, rotary pistol and differential pressure flowmeters suitable for measuring a variety of fluids.

Whether limestone bins and crushers with excessive mechanical stress, coolers or tall silos with large diameters – the right amount of feeding, correct clinker level or dosing of clinker, gypsum and other additives is very important for maintaining the cement quality as well as productivity.

SITRANS L offers the right solution for any application with Radar, ultrasonic, guided-wave Radar, capacitance, hydrostatic, gravimetric or electromechanical types.

Bucket elevators and other feed conveyors lie at the heart of many operations and it is important that events such as conveyor slowdown, stoppage, loss of buckets or chain breakdown are immediately communicated to the control room. The speed alarm can warn instantly of equipment malfunction. This enables faults to be detected as early as possible, minimizing downtime and enabling rapid control and rectification of faults.

Different types of SITRANS acoustic sensors are available for pump monitoring and for material flow monitoring. SITRANS AS100 detects changes in high-frequency sound waves from equipment and materials in motion. It reacts instantly to changes in solids flow to warn of blockages, product absence, or equipment failure such as burst filter bags. This allows the cement plant operators to take early preventative action and avoid costly damage, and hence ensure optimum filtering of exhaust gases.

In modern production systems, the unique coding of products or components is a key requirement. For reading and verifying 1D/2D codes, such as barcodes and data matrix codes, Siemens code reading systems provide just the right products. They also permit the tracing of production batches beyond the production plant.

The SIMATIC vision sensor is a complete image processing system for the automatic inspection of objects. It is ideally suited for use under harsh industrial conditions and for manufacturing, and for example in packing.

SIWAREX PLC-based weighing electronics provide a comprehensive range of weighing processors for force measurements, hopper, batching, differential batching, bagging and belt scales, and solids flowmeters. Complete integration of the SIWAREX weighing modules into the SIMATIC system platform is not a problem. CEMAT has all function blocks available to interface with the devices and control the process.

SIWAREX load cells and mounting elements comply with the requirements of cement process and their suitability has also been proven. Multiple ranges of load cells make them suitable for almost every application with high accuracy and a large measuring range.

For inventory purposes, the feed rate of the limestone conveyer to the crusher, and sometimes the feed rate after the crusher, is monitored with belt scales. With a track record for consistent performance in harsh environments, the conveyor belt scales combine a simple, drop-in installation, low maintenance and repeatable accuracy for productive operations.

For continuous in-line weighing of dry bulk solids, free flowing powders, or granular material, flowmeters are indispensable. The sensing heads are mounted outside the process installations, and produce accurate, repeatable results. They can be employed for critical functions such as batch load-out and blending.