ABSTRACT
Portland cement, having a tangible history of about 200 hundred years, is now produced and consumed in almost all habitable regions of the world. The industry has turned out to be the largest of all manufactured products. The growth in consumption has been phenomenal from about 1.0 billion ton per year in 1990 to 4.0 billion ton in 2017. According to International Energy Agency, the growth rate of cement production may vary from 12% to 23%.
In the top 12 cement-producing countries in the world, there are approximately 1800 manufacturing facilities with average capacity ranging from 1500 to 7000 tons per day. These outfits are equipped with large-scale primary machinery for mining, raw grinding, homogenizing, pyro processing, finish grinding, packing, and shipping. The machineries are interfaced in a manner that the output of the first unit operation forms the input of the second, and so on, in the successive stages with pre-defined quality tolerance limits. Further, the integrated plants are operated with profusely large number of essential auxiliary electrical and mechanical facilities including transportation and point-to-point conveying of materials. Hence, the entire process flow sheet and general layout of the integrated plants have become highly complex with numerous operational variables, some of which are measurable and some are interdependent non-measurable parameters. Notwithstanding such intricacies, the contemporary plants have been automated, instrumented, and micro-processor controlled, based on the advances made in simulation and modelling. But the technology level is yet to catch up with the industry 4.0 standards with autonomous operation and product control.
This chapter presents the status of contemporary cement manufacturing facilities, including their material and process interactions and also their energy and environmental performance. The scale and complexity in production and variability in materials and processes have been especially highlighted.
