Clinker Grinding - Energy Efficiency In Clinker Production

The cover story captures the journey of an age-old system of grinding to the present one. It covers from mill internals to the use of grinding aids.

- Lawrie Evans

A cement clinker is usually ground using a ball mill. This hardware is generally divided into two or three chambers, with different size of grinding media. As the clinker particles are ground further, smaller media are more efficient at reducing the particle size even further.

Grinding can be either ‘open circuit’ or ‘closed circuit’. In an open-circuit system, the feed of incoming clinker is adjusted in such a way that it achieves the desired fineness of the product. In the present day, open circuit has become obsolete. However, in a closed-circuit system, coarse particles are separated from the finer product in a separator and then brought back to a mill for further grinding.

Most of the time, grinding systems are custom designed according to the client’s specific needs and conditions, which means that the process and design requires fine tuning from the standard list of available machines. The consultant can help optimise the existing grinding process to maximise output and return on investment. The consultant can assist in evaluating and optimising the present level of operation, modifying and/or upgrading the existing grinding system to achieve a maximum sustainable production rate and improve system availability.

Energy consumption, during grinding operation, whether raw material or finished products is of paramount importance in present circumstances. Therefore, any innovation to reduce energy consumption is always watched closely not only in India but across the globe. Power generation, distribution and consumption are focused areas to many current world issues, controlling the industry’s energy usage is a matter of interest to different federal governments across the globe. There are different programmes initiated at government level in different countries like Energy Star in the US; Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) in India; and CO2 taxes/trading in Europe.