Economy & Market

Increasing energy efficiency in pneumatic conveying systems

Published

7 months ago

October 10, 2025

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Switching from traditional screw pumps to advanced rotary airlocks can dramatically cut energy use in pneumatic conveying.

Pneumatic conveying is a clean, quick and reliable way of moving materials around the plant. Ideal for both fine and coarse-grained materials, pneumatic conveying lines can be installed almost anywhere they are needed around cement plants and terminals, with much greater flexibility in terms of layout than their mechanical alternatives. High, low, bending left or right, they can adapt to your needs, enabling you to fit a new line into even the busiest sites. The enclosed pipe ensures no dust escapes to the local environment, keeping your plant clean and reducing the maintenance burden that comes from contaminants getting into machinery. The maintenance needs of the systems themselves are also low because there are very few moving parts, which gives you excellent availability as well as maximum peace of mind. And the capacity to convey at high pressures ensures you have ample throughput to meet the demands of your process.
All this adds up to a very low total cost of ownership compared with mechanical conveying, where the maintenance needs and associated productivity losses are much higher, and the flexibility is much lower. The result is that pneumatic conveying is almost always the most efficient means of transporting materials around a site.
In those instances where pneumatic conveying does not look like an efficient option, the reason is typically given as high energy consumption. However, the introduction of a new rotary airlock, the V-Series Airlock/Feeder, reduces the installed power of pneumatic conveying systems and lowers operating costs significantly.

Finding a more energy efficient feed system
Historically, the screw pump has been the preferred means of feeding pneumatic conveying lines. With more than 100 years experience, it is a proven technology and one that is still highly applicable for many conveying applications transporting fine, dry materials. But while the system is flexible in terms of capacity and layout, it can be beaten on energy efficiency by a rotary airlock. The following case studies illustrate two such examples.

Case study 1
Table 1 shows the details of the energy requirement for a cement plant s pneumatic conveying system with screw pump. This plant was using a pneumatic conveying system to transport raw meal to the preheater tower. To reduce the energy load for this operation, the plant wanted to explore alternatives to the screw pump line charger. We introduced them to the new V-Series rotary airlock.

V-Series rotary airlock
The V-Series is a 10-vein rotary airlock designed to handle dry, fine powder or granular product at high-pressure differentials up to 29 psig (2 bar) in dense phase or dilute phase systems. It requires much less power on the drive motor, generating a significant energy saving, and it is more flexible in terms of the materials it can handle, giving plants the ability to transport a wider range of materials. In cement plants, the V-Series is typically used to transport cement kiln dust, cement, fly ash, pulverised coal and pet coke. In cement terminals, applications include unloading from railcars to storage silos, discharge from storage silos to use bins, loadout and packing systems.

Abrasion
Abrasive wear is a concern when operating rotary feeder/airlocks handling abrasive materials. Conventional feeder/airlocks are limited to lower pressure operation. However, this can be counteracted using specialist ceramic and tungsten carbide coatings on the rotor and feeder veins with the V-series feeder/airlock, which allows us to handle more abrasive materials at higher pressures.

Reduced energy consumption
Table 2 shows the significant reduction in installed power required with the V-Series at just 6 hp compared with 350 hp for the screw pump. This was the energy requirement for two airlocks, as were needed in this case, with each having an installed power of just 3 hp. This translates to an overall savings in total installed power of 32 per cent for the entire system and a reduction in operating costs of US$160 000 (Table 3), giving the plant a swift ROI of less than one year.

Case study 2
Figure 1 shows an old screw pump at a cement terminal in the US. The terminal operators wanted to repurpose the old silos for red masonry cement, which they needed to store separately to prevent product contamination. They requested that we put in a system that replaced the old screw pump but maintained the existing 12 in. x 24 in. rotary cut-off valve shown in the picture. The role of the airlock was to discharge masonry cement from the silo to a packing bin at a rate of 50 stph in an 8 in. pipeline, measuring 200 ft. long with five 90 elbows.
The system we designed is shown in Figure 2. We successfully installed the new V-Series airlock within the allotted space and achieved the desired capacity. The new system runs at 12 rpm, using the same air supply, which was 1400 sfcm at 18 psig. The Airlock is installed with a variable speed drive set to operate at between 5 and 30 rpm using a VFD drive, giving the terminal operators optimum efficiency.
This installation proves the flexibility of the system, which can be retrofitted into small spaces and replace outdated technology.

Conclusion
Significant energy savings and long-term reductions in operating costs can be achieved with a relatively straightforward switch from a screw pump to a V-Series airlock. For new conveying systems, the V-Series airlock is an energy efficient choice to help cement plants achieve their sustainability goals.

Sidebar: How does pneumatic conveying work?
A typical pneumatic conveying system runs what is known as two-phase conveying. This is a mix of dense and dilute phase conveying, in which the pipe is divided into a top half and a bottom half. Along the bottom, materials move relatively slowly. This is the dense phase. Along the top, you have fewer materials more widely dispersed in the dilute phase. These particles have been picked up by the conveying air and are almost flying along at a high velocity. As they lose velocity, they will drop out of the dilute phase and join the dense phase below. But, as the materials accumulate along the bottom of the pipe, the cross-sectional area through which air can move narrows and velocity increases again, allowing the conveying air to pick up particles and move them along at high velocity. This cycle repeats, giving a kind of wave formation in the materials along the bottom of the pipe.

Sidebar: Upgrading old systems
In the case of the cement terminal, switching from a screw pump to an airlock brought about greater efficiency and this is often the case for this kind of upgrade. However, it should be noted that in some instances when converting an old screw pump system to a rotary airlock, efficiency can be lost if displaced air needs to be compensated by increasing horsepower to the compressor or blower to an extent that the power savings on the airlock are cancelled out. For this reason, it s essential to check the existing system thoroughly before assuming that an upgrade will result in energy savings.

(Communication by the management of the company)

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TSR Will Define Which Cement Companies Win India’s Net-Zero Race

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4 days ago

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Jignesh Kundaria, Director and CEO, Fornnax Technology

India is simultaneously grappling with two crises: a mounting waste emergency and an urgent need to decarbonise its most carbon-intensive industries. The cement sector, the second-largest in the world and the backbone of the nation’s infrastructure ambitions, sits at the centre of both. It consumes enormous quantities of fossil fuel, and it has the technical capacity to consume something else entirely: the waste our cities cannot get rid of.

According to CPCB and NITI Aayog projections, India generates approximately 62.4 million tonnes of municipal solid waste annually, with that figure expected to reach 165 million tonnes by 2030. Much of this waste is energy-rich and non-recyclable. At the same time, cement kilns operate at material temperatures of approximately 1,450 degrees Celsius, with gas temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees. This high-temperature environment is ideal for co-processing, ensuring the complete thermal destruction of organic compounds without generating toxic residues. The physics are in our favour. The infrastructure is not.

Pre-processing is not the support act for co-processing. It is the main event. Get the particle size wrong, get the moisture wrong, get the calorific value wrong and your kiln thermal stability will suffer the consequences.

The Regulatory Push Is Real

The Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules 2026 mandate that cement plants progressively replace solid fossil fuels with Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF), starting at a 5 per cent baseline and scaling to 15 per cent within six years. NITI Aayog’s 2026 Roadmap for Cement Sector Decarbonisation targets 20 to 25 per cent Thermal Substitution Rate (TSR) by 2030. Beyond compliance, every tonne of coal replaced by RDF generates measurable carbon reductions which is monetisable under India’s emerging Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS). TSR is no longer a sustainability metric. It is a financial lever.

Yet our own field assessments across multiple Indian cement plants reveal a sobering reality: the primary barrier to scaling AFR adoption is not waste availability. It is the fragmented and under-engineered pre-processing ecosystem that sits between the waste and the kiln.

Why Indian Waste Is a Different Engineering Problem

Indian municipal solid waste is not the material that imported shredding equipment was designed for. Our waste streams frequently exceed 40 per cent to 50 per cent moisture content, particularly during monsoon cycles, saturated with abrasive inerts including sand, glass, and stone. Plants relying on imported OEM equipment face months of downtime awaiting proprietary spare parts. Machines built for segregated, low-moisture waste fail quickly and disrupt the entire pre-processing operation in Indian conditions.

The two most common failures we observe are what I call the biting teeth problem and the chewing teeth problem. Plants relying solely on a primary shredder reduce bulk waste to large fractions, but the output remains too coarse for stable kiln combustion. Others attempt to use a secondary shredder as a standalone unit without a primary stage to pre-size the feed, leading to catastrophic mechanical failure. When both stages are present but mismatched in throughput capacity, the system becomes a bottleneck. Achieving the 40 to 70 tonnes per hour required for meaningful coal displacement demands a precisely coordinated two-stage process.

Engineering a Made-in-India Answer

At Fornnax, our response to these challenges is grounded in one principle: Indian waste demands Indian engineering. Our systems are built around feedstock homogeneity, the holy grail of kiln stability. Consistent particle size and predictable calorific value are the foundation of stable kiln combustion. Without them, no TSR target is achievable at scale.

Our SR-MAX2500 Dual Shaft Primary Shredder (Hydraulic Drive) processes raw, baled, or loosely mixed MSW, C&I waste, bulky waste, and plastics, reducing them to approximately 150 mm fractions at throughputs of up to 40 tonnes per hour. The R-MAX 3300 Single Shaft Secondary Shredder (Hydraulic Drive), introduced in 2025, takes that primary output and produces RDF fractions in the 30 to 80 mm range at up to 30 tonnes per hour, specifically optimised for consistent kiln feeding. We have also introduced electric drive configurations under the SR-100 HD series, with capacities between 5 and 40 tonnes per hour, already operational at a leading Indian waste-processing facility.

Looking ahead, Fornnax is expanding its portfolio with the upcoming SR-MAX3600 Hydraulic Drive primary shredder at up to 70 tonnes per hour and the R-MAX2100 Hydraulic drive secondary shredder at up to 20 tonnes per hour, designed specifically for the large-scale throughput that higher TSR ambitions require.

The Investment Case Is Now

The 2070 Net-Zero target is not a distant goal for India’s cement sector. It starts today, with decisions being made on the plant floor.

The SWM Rules 2026 are already in effect, requiring cement plants to replace coal with RDF. Carbon credit markets are opening up, and coal prices are not going to get cheaper. Every tonne of coal a cement plant replaces with waste-derived fuel saves money on one side and generates carbon credit revenue on the other. Pre-processing infrastructure is no longer just a compliance requirement. It is a business investment with a measurable return.

The good news is that nothing is missing. The technology works. The waste is available in every Indian city. The government has provided the policy direction. The only thing standing between where the industry is today and where it needs to be is the commitment to build the right infrastructure.

The cement companies that move now will not just meet the regulations. They will be ahead of every competitor that waits.

About The Author

Jignesh Kundaria is the Director and CEO of Fornnax Technology. Over an experience spanning more than two decades in the recycling industry, he has established himself as one of India’s foremost voices on waste-to-fuel technology and alternative fuel infrastructure.

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