To produce high-quality cement, the mineralogical and chemical composition of raw materials as well as intermediate and finished products has to be determined. At each stage of production, samples have to be taken, processed and analyzed to ensure quality control without gaps. CARBOLITE GERO, ELTRA, RETSCH and MICROTRAC MRB offer high-quality solutions for heat treatment, elemental analysis, sample preparation and particle sizing of a vast range of products in the cement industry.
CARBOLITE GERO offers a range of furnaces for quality assurance of raw materials and process testing.
A major requirement of cement is that it is compliant with standards including EN 197 and ASTM C150. Quality assurance of raw materials used for calcination and also during clinker production is essential.
Carbolite Gero's AAF 1100 °C Ashing Furnaces and our CWF 1200 °C or 1300 °C General Purpose Furnaces are ideally suited for 'loss on ignition tests'. Their use ensures the production process meets the quality standards and provides ash samples for additional analysis. A new alternative to consider is our AAF-BAL 11/17 Ashing furnace with integrated balance.
In addition, the combustibility (free lime content) of the clinker can be tested at intervals using the higher temperature RHF 16/8 (1600 °C) Furnace. This is particularly important in situations where there is variability in the raw materials employed.
ELTRA develops combustion analyzers for precise and sensitive CHNOS determination in solids.
Elemental analyzers based on combustion technology are a useful addition to XRF analysis for the quality control of cement and related products, ensuring fast, precise and reliable determination of carbon and sulfur. With its offering of analyzers using resistance or induction furnaces or both, ELTRA covers a wide range of applications for C and S determination in organic and inorganic samples. The product range is ideally suited to the variety of analytical applications in a cement plant.
Typical thermogravimetric applications include the determination of moisture, volatiles and ash in coal, coke, and secondary fuels, or loss on ignition (LOI) testing of cement. The TGA Thermostep analyzer can process 19 samples simultaneously. For every analysis cycle temperature and atmosphere are individually selected.
RETSCH provides size reduction and sieving equipment designed for sample preparation and characterization of solids.
In cement production RETSCH instruments are used for sample preparation at various stages in the production process, from the quarrying of the raw materials to the final product. The typical sample preparation process involves preliminary size reduction in one of RETSCH’s jaw crushers down to a size of approximately 5 mm followed by fine grinding to sizes of 100 microns and smaller, either in a planetary ball mill or a vibratory disc mill.
Production of smooth pellets for XRF analysis: The vibratory disc mill is typically used for sample homogenization prior to XRF analysis and delivers the required grind sizes <100 microns in a matter of seconds. For pressing the powdered sample into a smooth and stable pellet RETSCH offers a range of pellet presses, as benchtop and floor models, with maximum pressures between 25 and 40 tons.
Sieve Analysis: The standard DIN EN 196-6:2010-5 stipulates air jet sieving as the method of choice for the determination of the fineness of cement. RETSCH’s Air Jet Sieving Machine AS 200 jet is ideally suited for sieve cuts of powdered materials. In combination with the software EasySieve® for easy evaluation and documentation of results, it provides quick and reliable results.
Microtrac MRB is the leading manufacturer of image analyzers for measuring particle size and particle shape of bulk materials.
The instruments of the CAMSIZER series cover a size range from 0.8 µm to 30 mm and provide accurate, easy and flexible particle size analysis. Thanks to the high resolution optical system and short analysis time, the CAMSIZER is a time-saving and economic alternative to the labor-intensive and error-prone sieve analysis. Moreover, image analysis is the only measurement technique which provides valuable information on particle shape.
There are two CAMSIZER instruments available:
CAMSIZER X2
