3.1 Introduction:
Quality is the most important parameter for any manufacturing industry. Getting
declared quality product is important to the customer. Hence, quality control
specifically in continuous process has been challenging task, as the process does
not provide second opportunity to correct the product defects. Hence, quality
control of the product plays very significant role in any manufacturing unit and it
is mandatory required to check quality at every stage of the process to deliver
desired quality product.
In a continuous manufacturing process like cement, the product emerges in bulk
and control on consistency of product quality becomes biggest challenge. But at
the same time improvement in overall process productivity is equally important
for the entire business. Lab automation has been the right answer for the same in
cement industry.
Today, the top global players in cement manufacturing are concentrating on Kiln
Feed uniformity index through lab automation. The plants with auto lab could
able to improve its overall process productivity and ranking as a benchmark globally.
The quality appraisal is possible either by manual inspection at every step of the
process or with man-machine interfacing. Nowadays all the major cement
manufacturers are implementing fully automatic quality sampling; testing and
controlling systems at their plants. On this concept various inputs were taken
from consultants, equipment suppliers, own experience, cement magazines, and
advance technology literatures. The main focus of new technology was to achieve
operational efficiency with optimum cost investment in following manner:
- Minimize the wastage of raw material
- Achieving consistent quality by phased inspection at various stages of process
- Tendering quality product from the plant
- Optimize man power for plant monitoring
- Minimize Human Intervention errors
- Reducing thermal energy by raw mix optimization
- Reducing electrical energy by equipment optimization
- Higher productivity
- Minimum quality deviations
- Lowest fuel consumption
- Higher productivity
- Higher reliability factor for kiln
- Optimum power consumption for clinkerization and grinding
- Uniform granulometry of clinker
- Optimum free-lime with the lowest possible liter weights.
- Ideal & soft clinker morphology for the efficient finish grinding.