Thermoeconomic analysis of a cement production plant

Abstract:

The cement sector is one of the largest energy and resources consuming industry at the global scale, what makes it critical to increase the efficiency of the cement manufacturing processes by identifying the irreversibilities. Accordingly, a thermoeconomic analysis of the cement manufacturing process is carried out in this paper, making use of the exergy property to characterize associated energy and raw material consumptions. The existing parameters of a real cement plant have been proposed as the reference case. New scenarios have been analyzed so as to study the potential for improvement in terms of fuel or raw material consumption with respect to the reference case. The reference case shows that the most inefficient processes are the cement mill, raw mill, cyclone preheater, clinker cooler, fuel and pet coke burners, gas conditioning tower and filter. In order to improve the efficiency of the plant, the use of horizontal roller mills instead of ball mills are proposed, involving a reduction of 1961 kW in resources consumption. In the same way, the use of a greater amount of raw material from waste, would entail a benefit of 28420 kW with respect to the reference case. Meanwhile, insulation in cyclones would achieve a reduction of 13338 kW, and the use of waste fuels, would entail a reduction of 1069 kW in the kiln burner.

Año de publicación:

2016

Keywords:

• Resources consumption
• exergy cost
• thermoeconomic analysis
• Cement manufacturing process
• Thermoeconomic diagnosis
• Exergy

Fuente:

scopus