Ranjan Tayal, Senior Vice President – Business Consulting, Ramco Systems
Enterprise Process Solutions division of Ramco Systems offers a comprehensive suite of process optimisation products, control and automation solutions and services that address the unique requirements of cement, power, fertilisers, minerals, metals and other continuous process industries. Ranjan Tayal, Senior Vice President – Business Consulting, Ramco Systems, speaks to ICR and shares his views on the energy efficiency in the cement plants with focus on Ramco Optima which has been developed by a confluence of control-system process optimisation experts. Excerpts from the interview.
How energy- efficient is our cement industry?
The cement industry in India is probably the most efficient in the world, and has a well-deserved reputation for technology interventions. Most plants have thermal and electrical specific energy consumption comparable to the best in the industry. There is a sufficient focus on the plant layout design which also contributes to energy savings.
Which are the most common energy drainers in a cement plant?
The grinding mills that consume high electrical energy and the kiln that consumes highest thermal energy are probably the most common energy drainers.
In a cement plant, the cost of grinding per tonne of material is high due to transportation costs, power consumption, etc, and needs to be controlled. As for the kiln, the fuel used quality of the fuel and the raw meal composition can cause energy inefficiencies.
How much can a plant expect to save in energy costs by applying IT solutions?
This could vary depending on the existing technologies, equipment and processes, and housekeeping practices adopted by the plant. However, an average of 2û3 per cent energy savings can be expected.
What kinds of energy saving solutions do you offer?
Ramco offers solutions for raw-mix proportioning, pyro-optimisation and mills optimisation through Ramco Optima. Ramco Optima is a platform over which the state-of-the-art optimisation technologies can be embedded. It is a framework on which different applications are easily built. Ramco Optima helps users create a qualitative decision-making support system containing rules that are easily understood by a process domain expert.
What are the major benefits of using Ramco Optima?
Ramco Optima is used where human judgment or logical expressions are involved, especially in areas where early diagnosis are critical, where the process is non-linear and dynamic and where decision making is very demanding. The key objectives and benefits of Ramco Optima are that it helps to lower the fuel as well as power consumption/per ton of clinker produced in kilns, eliminate clinker quality variations, and cement quality variations; helps optimising cement mills for specific power reduction and consistent quality of products, and also provides an opportunity to the management to improve their efficiencies.
Would you brief us on Ramco Optima Blending Control System?
The key objective of quality control in cement plant is to produce the correct quality of raw meal by the proper proportioning of materials to the raw mill. The major objectives are controlling the quality of raw meal, automatic logging of X-ray analysis data, and automatic transmission of feeder set points to the controller. Ramco OBCS helps to achieve the right blend of raw meal to ensure that a consistent quality of clinker and cement is produced.