Venkatesh Seshadri, Head – Cement Business, Fuchs Lubricants India talks about the role of your lubricants in the maintenance of cement making machinery and equipment.
Fuchs Lubricants India is a subsidiary of Fuchs Petroleum, Germany. They entered into a joint venture in 1994 and took full operational ownership in 1999. They have a manufacturing facility in Ambernath, near Mumbai, where the production capacity is 23,000 tonnes of material per annum. The specialty division of Fuchs Lubricants India takes care of the cement business. They are a small team scattered across nationally and are capable of supplying an entire range of lubricants to a cement plant – starting from crusher to packing plant and from the quarry to lorry. Technical services are the backbone of this business. The measure maintenance prone requirement comes for open gears or the girth gear lubrication systems. Their service team is bigger than the sales team with their service engineers located across clusters in India and they keep giving services on a free of cost basis to the customers. The technical service team is experienced and equipped to do all kinds of maintenance activities related to girth gears like monitoring, repair work, alignment, grinding etc. Fuchs Lubricants India also supplies gear oils, hydraulic oils and various kinds of synthetic oils to the cement plants. They do sampling, analysis and reporting for their machinery and equipment and give them recommendations for the oils required. They also tell their customers when the oil should be changed and how their equipment is performing. They have total cost ownership, and are not forgetful of their customers after supplying the lubricants and oils. The company takes ownership and helps reduce their inventory and achieve optimisation in lubrication consumption. This creates a win-win situation for the customer as well as the organistaion.
Expertise of Care With regards to the machinery or equipment in a cement plant that is most exposed to wear and requires maximum lubrication and attention, it is the kiln and ball mill open gear. They require expertise in care to maintain them as they are difficult to handle. The value addition that Fuchs provides here is the service team availability. They are trained in Germany and are also sent to other countries to extend their expertise in training. CEPLATTYN grade of lubricants are used for the kiln. This product was developed in 1965 and has been bettered over time. Fuchs is still recognised through this grade of lubricant and proudly so. Largely the selection of lubricant for any machinery at a plant depends on its condition and climatic conditions, which play a very important role in the selection of the type and quality of lubricant. They also provide additional services that suit the climatic conditions, that help maintain the lubrication in machinery and also educate them on the storage of lubrication according to the conditions of the location of the plant. They also give them training to use their lubricants to their full potential.
Sustainable Efforts Most of the lubricants that Fuchs provide are aimed to ensure maximum utilisation of the life of the equipment and machinery. For example, if a gear oil must perform for 20,000 hours, their product extends this time duration, outperforming the promised lifetime. So, when sustainability comes into play, the idea is to have an extended life for the oil, which reduces the change intervals on a machine, thus reducing heating and power consumption of the machinery. This leads to sustainability in the cement plant through the contribution of their lubricants. They use some niche additives imported from Germany, which help enhance the lubricant performance and increase machinery and equipment life. The cement industry is evolving and Fuchs is adapting to the changes in the industry. They are not sticking to the primitive methods of supplying the products and then selling old products. They are resilient and are adapting to the needs of their customers by developing new products every couple of years to match the speed of their upgrade. They are not restricting themselves only as lubricant suppliers, they also extend their services as a business partner to the customers where they can get value addition from their partnership. They also try to provide cost benefits of operating the plants. This is how Fuchs is collaborating and wishes to collaborate with the Indian cement industry in the future as well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Venkatesh Seshadri looks after sales at Fuchs Lubricants Ltd in the capacity of its Sales Manager.
Adani group has reportedly expressed interest in acquiring a cement plant from Jaiprakash Associates, located in Karnataka with a capacity of 1.2Mt per year. The plant is reportedly in the middle of an as yet incomplete deal between Jaiprakash Associates’ and Dalmia Bharath for a value of US$671mn for a transfer of the former’s cement and power plants. It has also been reported that Adani Group is in talks with several companies over possible acquisitions as a means to double its cement producing capacity to 140mt per year by the end of 2028.
Dalmia Bharat recorded a rise of 9.6 per cent in its sales y-o-yfrom 12Mt in the first half of financial year 2023 to 13.2Mt in the first half of financial year 2024. This rise has led to an increase in earnings from US$116m to US$144m during the same period. The company started commercial production from their new 5,00,000t/yr capacity clinker plant in Ariyalur and 2mt/yr Sattur grinding plant, both located in Tamil Nadu, raising the company’s clinker capacity to 22.2Mt/yr. This increase in capacity was attributed largely to the company’s foresight in estimating high growth in construction material demand in the country due to a boom in infrastructure development. The company has also managed to reduce their carbon footprint to 456kg/t of cement, lowest recording globally in the cement industry.
The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), funded by power provider BP recently reported that it will require a Capital expenditure investment of USD627Bn to decarbonise the Indian cement and steel sector, to reach net zero CO2 emissions. According to the report, the Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) and other similar efficiency enhancing upgrades to cement plants can help reduce the industry’s emissions down by 32 per cent immediately.