Displaying items by tag: ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions

India: The India Cements expects to commission the upgraded grinding unit at its Sankar Nagar cement plant in Tamil Nadu later in September 2023. Hindu BusinessLine News has reported that the producer is undertaking the upgrade in order to increase efficiency and lower the plant’s operating costs. The producer has hired US-based Boston Consulting Group to ascertain other possible improvements to three of its plants in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. At its Chilamkur cement plant in Andhra Pradesh, it is installing a waste heat recovery (WHR) system, scheduled for delivery in early 2024. FLSmidth and ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions are both reportedly conducting ‘detailed studies’ for possible future projects for The India Cements.

Turkmenistan: State-owned Turkmencement has successfully carried out an upgrade to its 1Mt/yr Lebap cement plant at Koytendag. The upgrade involves the installation of a new 3000t/day kiln line, supplied by Germany-based thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions. The producer first announced the project in mid-2020, and ordered the new line in mid-2021.

In 2022, the Lebap cement plant produced 1.1Mt of cement, up by 11% year-on-year from 991,000t in 2021.

Portugal: The first batch of clinker has been manufactured on the new upgraded production line at Secil’s Outão plant. Construction and start-up teams from ThyssenKrupp Polysius reached the milestone in mid-April 2023 after a heating period of 72 hours. Germany-based ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions was appointed by Secil to work on the Clean Cement Line project in 2020. It said it was going to modify the existing rotary kiln and preheater tower, install a new calciner and add a new grate cooler. Once finished it will produce Portland limestone cement (PLC). It is scheduled for commissioning in mid-2023.

Italy-based CTP Team was contracted in mid-2020 to supply and install a 29MW waste heat recovery (WHR) unit for the project. It planned to use an organic rankine cycle (ORC) unit using a 7.2MW turbine supplied by Turboden.

Italy-based Bedeschi also revealed in early April 2023 that it was in the cold commissioning phase for a new pipe conveyor at the plant to handle different kinds of alternative fuels. The conveyor has a diameter of 250mm and conveying length of 350m and will transport alternative fuels at a rate of 300m³/hr.

Burkina Faso: Ciments de l'Afrique (CIMAF) has ordered a Polysius booster mill from Germany-based ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions (TKIS) for its grinding plant at Ouagadougou. This is the first industrial reference of the product that promises to allow a greater substitution of clinker with local filler by boosting the fineness and reactivity of the clinker. It will also maintain both cement quality to local standards and production capacity of the exiting ball mill at the unit.

Mohamed Naciri, the Regional General Manager for CIMAF, commented “Burkina Faso is a landlocked country where clinker has to travel at least 1200km to reach Ouagadougou, every technology aiming to decrease the cement clinker factor is welcome, this project is also an important milestone in our decarbonation road map, TKIS is a key partner for CIMAF to decrease our group CO₂ footprint.”

CIMAF owns and operates 13 grinding plants in Africa. It runs plants in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Mali, and Mauritania. CIMAF's parent company, Omnium des Industries et de la Promotion (OIP), is a cement supplier across north, west, and central Africa, producing about 12Mt/yr. It is the third largest cement producer in Morocco with two integrated plants.

Vietnam: ThyssenKrupp Polysius’ Asia Pacific division has secured an order for two Polflame-type main burners for an unnamed cement plant. The equipment supplier has highlighted the ability of its burner product to cope with low-grade coal and support high alternative fuel substitution rates as key selling factors. The order follows the purchase of an Impact Crusher by the same customer previously.

Lukas Schoeneck, the chief executive officer of Polysius Asia Pacific, said "We are very proud to add burners number 17 and 18 to our installed base in Vietnam which ensures our market leader position. Now we have to put our focus on the delivery and installation of the burner - in time and quality.”

India: ThyssenKrupp Industries India has reported information on recent orders with UltraTech Cement, Shree Cement and Hills Cement.

Its Polysius division has secured an order from UltraTech Cement for the design, engineering and supply of two 10,000t/day pyro processing lines with Polycom rolls for raw materials grinding.

Shree Cement has ordered pyro processing equipment including a Polytrack clinker cooler for a new cement plant at Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. ThyssenKrupp Industries India noted that it was the “maiden plant order” from Shree Cement and of “great strategic importance to us.”

Hills Cement has also made a first order with ThyssenKrupp. In this case it has requested pyro processing equipment including a clinker cooler for the second production line at its plant in Meghalaya.

Congratulations are due to the National Cement Company of Alabama and Vicat for the inauguration of the new production line at the Ragland cement plant in Alabama. The event took place on 21 July 2022.

The US$300m project was originally announced in late 2019. It then took two years to build with construction starting in January 2020. Key features include a raw vertical grinding mill, a new roller mill, a five stage preheater tower, an automatic clay storage system, a 78m tall homogenisation silo, an alternative fuels storage area for tyre-derived fuel, sawdust and wood chips, a laboratory and a new control room. The new kiln was previously reported to have a clinker production capacity of 5000t/day and it will add up to 2Mt/yr of cement production capacity to the plant. ThyssenKrupp signed up as the principal equipment supplier in 2019 and H&M was the main contractor. The production line is expected to reduce energy consumption by one third. Further change is scheduled with a switch to production of Portland limestone cement (PLC) from Ordinary Portland cement (OPC) by the start of 2023.

Vicat has repeatedly noted its affection for the plant as it was the first cement plant the group purchased outside of France, back in 1974. Indeed, Vicat’s group chair and chief executive officer Guy Sidos personally managed the Ragland plant in 2001. However, rather more prosaic reasons may also have been behind the decision to expand Ragland. According to United States Geological Survey (USGS) data, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee’s cement shipments grew by nearly 5% year-on-year to 7.1Mt in 2019 from 6.8Mt in 2018. Shipments are up by 3% year-on-year to 2.5Mt in the first four months of 2022 and the three states were the fifth largest region in the US for cement shipments in April 2022. A shortage of cement was also reported in Alabama in April 2022.

The other big US-based cement plant expansion is Lehigh Hanson’s US$600m upgrade to its Mitchell plant in Indiana. It also celebrated a milestone this week with a ‘topping out’ ceremony to mark the placement of the final section of steel for the stack. Another recent achievement here was the completion of a 169,000t storage dome supplied by Dome Technologies. The supplier says that the 67m diameter and 48m tall dome is the second largest clinker storage facility in Europe and North America, after one it previous built in Romania in 2008.

The Mitchell K4 project was announced in mid-2018 and then ground breaking began in late 2019. However, the start of the coronavirus pandemic delayed construction in early 2020 before it restarted in September 2020. The revised commissioning date was then moved back about half a year to early 2023. The key part of this project is that it will replace the plant’s three current kilns with just one. The new production line will increase the site’s production capacity, reduce energy usage and decrease CO₂ emissions per tonne of cement. It was reported by local press back in 2018 that the project would increase the plant’s cement production capacity to 2.8Mt/yr. The project has been linked to supplier KHD with CCC Group as the contractor.

It’s fascinating to see two major new upgrades to cement plants emerging in a mature market like the US and during an unprecedented event like the emergence of coronavirus. No doubt compelling tales will emerge of how both teams coped with managing nine-figure capital expansion projects as a global public health emergency unfolded. The US market has been on a roll in recent years, despite all the uncertainty in the world, and so far it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. With luck both of the projects feature above have timed their opening right.

Germany: ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions’ Polysius division says that it has been commissioned by Buzzi Unicem, HeidelbergCement, Schwenk Zement and Vicat to build a pure oxyfuel kiln system at the Mergelstetten cement plant as part of the Cement Innovation for Climate (CI4C) project. No dates of the start of construction or final project commissioning of the industrial trial have been disclosed. CI4C was originally formed in 2019.

The Polysius pure oxyfuel process is a new type of clinker production process in which the otherwise normal ambient air is replaced by pure oxygen in the kiln combustion process. One advantage of the technology is that atmospheric nitrogen is eliminated from the clinker burning process leading to much higher concentrations of CO₂ in the exhaust gas compared to a conventional kiln. As such the process aims to concentrate, capture and reuse almost 100% of the CO₂ produced in a cost-effective manner. The medium-term goal is to further process the captured CO₂ with the help of renewable energy into products such as kerosene for air traffic.

Vietnam: ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions Vietnam (TISV) and the Vietnam Institute of Building Materials (VIBM) have signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation between both parties on the research and application of new technologies towards reducing the CO₂ emissions of cement production. At the signing ceremony, Lukas Schoeneck, the chief executive officer of TISV confirmed his commitment to collaborate with VIBM, under the guidance of the Deputy Minister of Construction Nguyen Van Sinh. The parties now plan to identify a lighthouse project that will use alternative fuels in response to an increase in the global price of coal.

Pham Van Bac, Head of the Building Material Division at the Ministry of Construction, said that Vietnam is implementing the a strategy for the development of building materials for the period 2021 - 2030, with a vision to 2050. The plan for the cement industry is to limit the use of natural resources, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save energy while promoting the maximum use of waste streams from industries and domestic sources as raw materials in cement production.

African cement producers have confirmed their interest in calcined clay over the last month with two new projects. The big one was announced last week when FLSmidth revealed that it had received an order from CBI Ghana. This follows the launch of a Limestone Calcined Clay (LC3) project in Malawi in mid-March 2022 in conjunction with Lafarge Cement Malawi.

FLSmidth says that its order includes the world’s largest gas suspension calciner system and a complete grinding station. The kit will be installed at CBI Ghana’s plant near Accra in the south of the country. The new clay calciner system is expected to substitute 30 - 40% of the clinker in the final product, resulting in a reduction of up to 40% CO₂/t of blended cement compared to Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC). Overall the equipment manufacturers reckon that the grinding plant will reduce its CO₂ emissions by 20% compared to its current output. There has been no indication of how much the order costs but CBI Ghana expects energy and fuel savings, as well as lower overheads from clinker imports.

The public announcement of the Ghana project was also foreshadowed by the visit of Professor Karen Scrivener to the Ghana Standards Authority in February 2022. This was significant because Scrivener is the head of the Laboratory of Construction Materials at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and has been one of the key instigators of the LC3 initiative since the early 2000s. Other calcined clay cements are available such as Futurecem or polysius activated clay (see below) but LC3 is arguably the most famous given its promotion in developing countries.

The Malawi project is at a much earlier stage. The government launched the public private partnership LC3 project in mid-March 2022 in conjunction with Lafarge Cement Malawi and Terrastone, a brick manufacturer. The Ministry of Mining is currently developing a memorandum of understanding with the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), a Germany-based development agency. India-based Tara Engineering has also been linked to the scheme.

One thing to note about the Malawi project is that it is the first calcined clay project in the cement industry based in East Africa. All the other African ones are based in West Africa. The other two projects in this region are run by Turkey-based Oyak Çimento and its subsidiary Cimpor. The first of these is a 0.3Mt/yr calcined clay and a 2400t/day cement grinding production line that was commissioned in mid-2020. This plant is based at Abidjan in Ivory Coast. The second is a new plant that Germany-based ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions is building for Oyak Çimento at Kribi in Cameroon. This unit has a 720t/day calcined clay and a 2400t/day cement production capacity and it will use the supplier’s ‘polysius activated clay’ technology. ThyssenKrupp’s involvement came to light in early 2020 and commissioning was scheduled for late 2021. However, no update on the state of the project has been issued so far in 2022.

As the above examples show, Sub-Saharan Africa has at least one live calcined clay plant, two plants are being built and there’s one more at the development stage. This puts the region neck-and-neck with Europe, which has a similar mixture of current and developing projects. This column has been covering the wider trend of the growing usage of various types of blended cements recently, particularly in Europe and the US, with slag cements, Portland Limestone Cement (PLC) and more. With PLC, for example, note the transition of another two North American cement plants to PLC this week alone. As for calcined clay cement, it is fascinating to see the focus move to a different part of the world. Several commentators have predicted that the future looks set to be dominated by blended cements using whichever supplementary cementitious material (SCM) is most available for each plant. The growth in calcined clay confirms this view.

Global Cement is researching clay calcination use in the cement industry for the next edition of the Global Cement Directory. Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with any information on new industrial and research installations.