Discussion Round-Up: 8 Feb. 2019

Has cement hit the point when small incremental improvements are becoming more difficult to achieve?

Media enjoys the big-bang of a technology breakthrough - especially a breakthrough that promises to solve one of the world's pressing challenges (most regularly, the challenge of climate change). Yet the promise of big-bang breakthroughs often is not followed through by their reality. This is especially true in industries that contain many legacy plants, representing a huge amount of sunk investment. Cement plants are just such large bits of infrastructure, designed to last for decades. In such circumstances, a combination of incremental upgrade of existing - older - plants offers the most feasible way of improving the industry.

As Matt Devitt (and Peter Paone) noted in this week's World Cement LinkedIn Group Discussion, the existence of a large fleet of legacy plants is why "I see small improvements as the straightforward option, due to newer improvements not only being a quantum leap forward for the main process by also to the supporting infrastructure. I see this as a reason for some plants only making incremental improvements."

The many stakeholders - investors, regulators, customers - add additional complications to the picture and further support the idea that small incremental change offer the most viable route forward. "It's a big balancing act," said Paone. " I believe the need to balance so many things tends to create more of a focus on incremental changes. Why invest in new technology, if a regulatory interpretation or a change in regulations will make it harder to operate?"

So are incremental changes becoming more difficult to achieve?

Those contributing to this week's discussion did not believe so. As Dr J.D. Bapat noted: "although the basics of cement manufacturing have not changed [over] the last hundred years, numerous changes have occurred in the unit operations. The changes have resulted in [a] substantial reduction in heat and power consumption, raw material conservation, and environmental protection. The best is yet to come."

The following potential areas in which incremental change offers opportunities were suggested by our discussion contributors:

Grinding operations

"The grinding operations in cement manufacturing [...] still have very low efficiency. Just a 10% improvement over the existing can bring [a] big difference to a large cement plant," noted Dr Bapat. Similarly, Thomas Holzinger argued there was "still room to improve the grinding systems and reduce the electrical energy consumption or decrease the clinker factor. Both are heading in the right direction to reduce the CO2 footprint."

Remote monitoring/predictive maintenance + process expertise

"The real innovation - with Industry 4.0 - is remote cloud monitoring and analysis of all aspects of a plant's performance by real process experts [...] and helping the plant improve via weekly or monthly Skype sessions to develop and implement action plans, which are then monitored to help the plant," said Tom Lowes.

This does not necessarily mean remote control or automation but the use of technology to enhance the abilities of the process experts that already operate at the plants: "an automation program can't generally pick up, for example, that the burning zone is cooling down because of a 'rhino horn' on the burner pipe. That requires a 'calibrated eyeball' that can't be programmed readily into an algorithm," added Paone.

Indeed, the existence of those 'calibrated eyeballs' was highlighted by a number of our contributors as something the industry has lost in recent years and the number of process experts in cement companies has dropped, while new process engineers are hard to find. "There are fewer process people in the industry as a whole," continued Paone. "We have to be aware of the critical need of young engineers in this industry to bring development."

The human element

This last point plays into the next one: that of ensuring plant personnel are properly trained and that that training is kept up-to-date.

"Train the [process] staff [and] follow-up regularly in small plant-specific projects," argued Holzinger. "According to my experience, that has a huge benefit and the learning curve is much faster. I have done this in many countries and geographic areas, and the benefit was incredible. Not tomorrow but steadily [over] the years."

The existence of a corps of properly-trained and motivated process experts will also create the conditions in which the next opportunities for incremental change are noticed. Recent innovations in compressed air management1 (another area in which incremental change is happening today: see note below) came about when engineers "put focus on an area that was not actively managed," explained Devitt. "Some innovations come from paying attention to the subsystems that impact the overall system."

Alternative fuels

Although common in some regions, the use of alternative fuels is another area where incremental growth could have a significant impact - particularly on the environmental performance of the industry. The change required here though is one that must occur in conjunction with another industry: waste collection.

"The goal is to support the plants, governments and lobbies in countries where alternative fuels and raw materials are still not available and substitution rates are rather low or zero," explained Holzinger. "Systems have to be implemented where waste material is collected, sorted, and processed for utilisation in the kiln."

Conclusion

Devitt began the discussion with reference to Japanese carmaker, Mazda, which has focused on improving the performance of the internal combustion engine (ICEs), rather than turning to hybrid or electric vehicles (EVs). Mazda's aim is to reduce "overall wheel-to-wheel emissions to 50% of the brand's 2010 levels by 2030 and 90% of said 2010 levels by 2050". At which point, Mazda's ICEs would be equal to EVs in terms of emissions and efficiency.

"Innovation has a momentum and needs continuous small pushed of achievement to maintain the course to revolutionary idea. That course happens to rarely be a straight line," concluded Devitt. "What we don't know is how - or if - these small improvements will lead to revolutionary change, though that is the hope.

Read the full discussion at World Cement's LinkedIn Group here. My thanks to all those who contributed their views: Dr J.D. Bapat, Matt Devitt, Thomas Holzinger, Tom Lowes, and Peter Paone.

Note

Devitt's comments on compressed air are worth quoting in full: "I have seen recently an increase in viewing plants as a system of connected systems, as well as plants having a better understanding of how compressed air cleans a baghouse. The improvements have been on monitoring and maintenance of the compressed air system and the end users’ system of the compressed air. This is seen with header pressure gauges being tied into the DCS to look for consistent pressure or failed pulse valves to auto drain systems on the header to reduce moisture to the pulse valve and into the filterbag."