Industrial Minerals - Fuel Economy in the Lepol Kilns

THE major operating costs in a cement plant are labor, power, and fuel. The opportunities and methods of savings in labor and power parallel other industries. Because our industry's use of fuel is large and its method of use is unique, the devices adapted for saving fuel are of interest. In normal practice the raw material in the form of a dry powder or a mud is fed to a rotating inclined cylinder where it is dried, calcined, and clinkered. In a Lepol kiln the raw material is rolled up into little balls with water in the nodulizer, fed to a traveling grate on which it is dried and partially calcined and tben to a short kiln where the process is finished. The more usual methods of saving heat have been the use of long kilns with chains in wet process plants and the use of waste heat boilers in dry plants (fig. 1). At the Santa Cruz plant we have used a Lepol system kiln and achieved a fuel 'economy of 4.7 gal per bbl of clinker or about 704,-000 Btu per bbl. This can be compared with our old kilns using the same fuel and raw material which consume 7.8 gal per bbl or 1,130,000 Btu per bbl. These are gross Btu and not the net figures usually used in reports of foreign companies. Our average consumption for 1948 was 708,000 Btu per bbl of Lepol clinker, based on cement sold, and oil purchased. The overall fuel consumption for 1948 was 6.61 gal per bbl. The Lepol system consists of a nodulizer, a grate, and a kiln. There is the usual accessory equipment which is similar to that used in other cement plants. The following description covers the equipment in operation at our plant. The nodulizer is a cylinder 8 ft 10 in. in diam by 18 ft long set on a slope of 1/2 in. per ft, and rotated at about 10 rpm. It is driven by a 50 hp wound rotor motor drawing about 9 kw. The inside of the shell is cleaned by a continuously operating scraper which draws 0.1 kw. The dry raw material is fed to the nodulizer where, being sprayed with water, it rolls into small spheres about 90 pct being between 1/2 and 1 in. in diam and containing about 15 pct water. The nodules fall on the traveling grate where the hot gas from the kiln is pulled down through the