Cement, Energy and Environment

Keeping this view in mind, JK lakshmi cement decided to increase its existing production capacity to capture more market that helps to improve the bottom line of the company, but going for a new green-field plant being an expensive proposition , the only alternative left is to sweat out the assets by brown fielding in the existing plant and to utilize the available resources to their full potential. To reduce the cost, it was decided that a team of JKLC will itself do this modification without involving any out side agency. The ultimate target was to increase the production by 1500 tpd with decrease in specific energy consumption. In house technical studies followed by deep deliberations have been carried out & the major bottlenecks were as below-: • Without TA duct, it is not feasible to increase % firing in calciner for complete combustion. • The biggest bottleneck is Precalci ner which is not sufficient to provide much needed retention time to burn petcoke. Gas ve locity through ILC duct is quite high. • • Cyclone ascending velocity being too high wi ll pose higher draft and heat loss to some extent at increased production. Due to high entry and exit velocities overall pressure drop for system is going to be very high and capacity of exhaust Fan may limit the production, besides incurring high power consumption. ... ~ .AIIRA._IIQ!mfEln • At increased clinker production , cooler loading will be high i.e. around 66 TPD/m2, it is very high against the norms 45tpd/m2, means cooler need to be upgraded at increased production level. • To maintain the same filling level, main drives need to be upgraded. In short, we can say that there were two major issues- High pressure drop across PH & inproper combustion in pre-calciner for th is expansion. An Enthustic & energetic team took it a challenge it self without hiring any out side agency. Keeping it in mind, lot of brain- storming sessions held to reduce the pressure drop across preheater. Two solutions emerged out -: 1. Increase in size of all cyclones 2. Installation of parallel preheater Option-2 was proven solution but this was not economicall y viable so it has been decided to go for in House modification of Cyclone inlet duct to improve aero dynamics. The uniqueness of this modification is that most of activities were carried out in running plant to reduce stoppage time by adopting the 'Theory of Constraints' for meticulous planning. The below picture is expressing the type of modification which has been done to increase Cyclone inlet area for reducing pressure drop. 1-'