Anant Pokharna, CEO, Unisol Inc, speaks at length about bespoke grinding aid formulations that are helping cement companies meet their carbon emissions targets.
Tell us about the cement additives,grinding aids and construction chemicals provided by your organisation to the cement industry.
Our product range includes bespoke grinding aid formulations, quality improvers and other relevant high-impact chemical additives that find application in cement manufacturing. Our products help cement producers in a range of applications including:
- Increased cement mill throughput and reduced specific power consumption
- Reduced clinker factor (content) in blended cements and corresponding increment in ecologically friendly and cheaper substitutes such as fly ash, slag, pond ash etc.
- Increased cement quality and strengths
- Special application premium cements
- Hydrophobic cements
- Increased raw mill throughput and reduction on power consumption
- Substitution of mineral gypsum with chemical / phosphor gypsum
Leveraging our extensive research and domain expertise, we design products that precisely meet our customers’ strategic and technical objectives.
How does your bespoke approach help your clients bring efficiency in their operations?
Every cement plant is a unique case, when it comes to its requirement for grinding aids and/or chemical additives. Before proposing the right chemical additive / grinding-aid, we comprehensively understand specific needs of each plant covering aspects
such as:
- Strategic and business needs
- Mineralogy, chemical, and physical properties of input materials such as clinker, gypsum, fly ash, slag etc.
- Baseline quality parameters such as compressive strengths, setting times, PSD, blaines and residues
- Process parameters and underlying process equipment etc.
Subsequently, an initial hypothesis is developed and multi-component blends (grinding-aid formulations) are prepared. Extensive trials and iterations are undertaken for assessing the impact of these formulations.
The best formulation(s) is/are tested at plant scale and validated for the impact in a full scale environment. Optimisations and fine-tuning efforts are undertaken to ensure maximum value delivery at plant scale. In a nutshell, we focus on delivering ‘solutions’ rather than ‘products’.
Why does your organisation pioneer the concept of open-sourcing of chemicals and on-site blending?
On-site blending is a leaner, better and more flexible approach to delivering grinding-aids and such chemical additives to remote cement factories.
Most legacy grinding aids (commercially available chemical additives typically supplied to cement producers) contain > 50 per cent water. Such high content of a low-value, high-volume ingredient, as water, leads to significantly higher costs associated with freight, duties and handling of pre-blended liquid solutions.
In addition, such pre-blended, ready-to-use chemical additives offer considerably diminished possibility of modifying concentration and formulation for different cement grades or for different objectives or for different process conditions.
The concept of on-site blending allows for a significantly improved model that involves:
- Delivery of chemical components of grinding-aid formulations to the cement factories in concentrated form (zero to very low water content)
- Addition of water on-site (at the cement factory)
- On-site blending of chemical components and water using mixing tanks
- Dosing of blended solutions into cement (or raw) mills
The above model allows for:
- Reduced costs of freight, packaging and handling
- Lower carbon footprint
- Higher transparency
- Greater flexibility in modifying products and formulations for mapping to different needs and objectives
What are the key factors of your products that help the cement industry reduce their carbon emission?
The most significant and primary contributor to CO2 and GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions during the cement manufacturing process is clinker production. Each tonne of clinker emits 800-890 kg of CO2 during the production process.
Clinker content in cements varies from 98 per cent in pure OPC (ordinary portland cement or pure cement) to 30 per cent in PSC (portland slag cement or blended slag cement).
Our grinding-aids and high-impact-strength-enhancers can help reduce clinker content in cement by 3 per cent to 10 per cent (depending on the compatibility and conditions). This reduction can therefore help lowering CO2 emissions between 30 kg to 80 kg per tonne of cement.
Assuming a total cement production of 400 million tonnes in India and about 4 billion tonnes worldwide, bespoke grinding aids with the right impact can help reduce carbon footprint by >10 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in India alone and >100 million tonnes per annum worldwide.
What role does technology play in providing better solutions to your clients?
Technology underpins our entire approach to design, delivery, and deployment of solutions for cement producers. Designing of these products is undertaken at our cutting-edge research centre in Noida, where we focus on developing advanced and bespoke products for our customers. Our dedicated team of cement scientists, engineers and chemists are conducting >100 trials (lab and plant scale) every year, in the process developing an in-depth domain and technology know-how.
Further, the deployment of these products / solutions at the cement plants in an optimised manner involves extensive experience in cement manufacturing process as well as the know-how around interaction of various chemical additives with the regular input materials and cement plant equipment.
How can your product help in achieving cost efficiency in the cement manufacturing process?
Our products help cement manufacturers in achieving greater cost efficiency through one or more of the following ways.
a) Reducing clinker factor in blended cements: Clinker contributes most significantly to the variable cost of cement production. One tonne of clinker ranges between Rs 2,200 to 3,500 in variable costs. Our products can help reduce clinker content in blended cements by 3 per cent to 10 per cent without affecting the strength and quality of final cement. The more expensive clinker can be replaced with cheaper ingredients such as fly ash (Rs 400-1200 per tonne) and slag (Rs 600-1500 per tonne).
b) Reducing specific power consumption: Our grinding aids help increase cement mill throughput with the same power consumption, in turn delivering reduced specific power consumption per tonne of cement. This helps reduce 2-3 KWH/tonne of cement production, leading to significant cost savings in the long run.
c) Replacement of expensive mineral gypsums with cheaper chemical / phospho gypsums: By increasing cement compressive strengths and accelerating setting times, our products allow for reducing / eliminating usage of mineral gypsums while increasing / replacing with chemical / phosphor gypsums that are much cheaper.
What are the major challenges you face while providing solutions to the Indian cement industry?
- Remote locations of the cement plant sites: Involves extensive travel by our team and
- associated hardships.
- Constantly changing quality of input materials, leading to a possible change in impact of our products and subsequent modification of the formulations to keep aligned with the objectives of the customer.
- Ever evolving needs of the customers: Strategic objectives keep changing and it is imperative for us to keep evolving with the needs of the customers.
- Cost-value trade-off: Not all cement plants have a direct use case of deployment of premium chemical additives. In such instances we have to ensure that the trade-off between cost and value delivery is appropriately balanced.
Tell us about ongoing innovations and research that the Indian Cement industry can look forward to?
One of the most significant research exercises that we are undertaking currently is development of high impact chemical additives, which would eventually help reduce clinker factor by up to 15 per cent in certain blended cements (such as PSC and PCC) without any reduction in final cement quality. The work is being undertaken not just for the Indian cement industry but for the global industry and we are keen on taking these solutions to our
clients worldwide.
How do you envision your contribution to the cement industry in the years to come?
We envision ourselves as a significant player in the cement manufacturing ecosystem, where all stakeholders would aggressively work towards a more sustainable and carbon neutral industry. Our products, solutions and approach will help the cement industry in producing leaner, greener and better cements, sustainably.
As the limestone reserves across the country face sustained pressure in terms of both life of the deposits as well as the quality of limestone being mined, there would be an ever-increasing role that we would need to play in deriving more cements with limited resources. Sustainability in cement production would be driven by increasing usage and deployment of chemical additives.
Additionally, pressure on cement producers will continue to grow exponentially to reduce their CO2 and GHG emissions. This in turn, would also enhance the potential contribution of our products and solutions in the ecosystem.
-Kanika Mathur
