Cement Technology 6.

3 Maintenance

Cement Manufacturing Technology

Module 6:
Sustainability in cement manufacturing – how to manufacture cement well.
6.3 Maintenance

In the exercises following session 3.1 of our course we calculated the mean time between
stops for the kilns of the participants on the course. This is the way the reliability of
cement kiln operations is compared. In general it is fair to say that the reliability
performance of cement kilns is very poor.

Mean Time Between Stops

<24 hours +1000 hours

The best very good.

The worst very bad.

Mean Time Between Stops

<24 hours +1000 hours

Inter-quartile range and median

offset towards bottom of range.

The majority of cement companies struggle to consistently operate their kilns in

campaigns longer than 150 hours. This is an area where there is need for improvement
across the industry as a whole. If aircraft had the reliability performance of cement kilns
no-one would fly.

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 Cement Technology 6.3 Maintenance

There some examples of cement companies who do much better.

Pahang Cement operate a modern precalciner kiln

at Bukit Sagu in Malaysia. The KHD, 5 stage,
precalciner kiln was commissioned in 2000. In
2003 the kiln ran for 8133 hours, with a total of 8
kilns stops. An MTBS of 1017 hours. The best
campaign was 142 consecutive days without an
interruption in feed. Granted this is a modern kiln,
with a straightforward layout. However, this
reliability performance is an example to the whole
cement manufacturing industry.

Kiln reliability can be improved by a combination of good operation and maintenance. It

is maintenance we will discuss in this session of the course.

The organisation of maintenance on a cement factory follows well established lines.

General
Management

Administration

Production Maintenance

Mechanical Electrical Process Control Stores

The different disciplines of mechanical and electrical engineering virtually require a

separation of responsibilities.

Process control may report through electrical or be a stand-alone department.

Each discipline will require their own skilled workforce, workshops and tools.

Spare parts holding falls naturally under maintenance and therefore stores, although this
may report to purchasing.

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The proportion of the workforce deployed in maintenance functions is on a rising trend.

As numbers in production fall with increasing automation, equipment becomes more
sophisticated.

Planned maintenance is widely practiced in the cement manufacturing industry. A

maintenance master schedule defines the intervals between periodic inspection of
machines and/or replacement of components. Computerised maintenance management
systems are being widely introduced. These computerised maintenance management
systems generate the work-orders from the maintenance master schedule and capture the
information from completed work orders to build up an equipment history system. Never-
the-less, despite this organisation and these systems the reliability record of the industry
is poor.

The organisation and the systems are not the issue, rather the things people do within the
organisation and the use which is made of the information captured in the maintenance
management systems. There is generally insufficient cause and effect analysis to identify
the underlying causes of unreliability. Is the periodic maintenance which is set out in the
maintenance master schedule addressing the real needs of the equipment?

Each equipment failure needs to trigger a formal cause and effects analysis.

For the kilns:

What are the different causes of failure?

Operations? Mechanical? Electrical? Etc?

What are the sub-causes of failure?

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Cement Technology 6.3 Maintenance

Pareto Analyses focus efforts on the elimination of the most frequent causes of failure.

Data needs to be gathered on the frequency and typical time to failure for major
equipment items and components.

Do most failures occur in

infancy?
Failure
Many cement kilns have Density
terrible start reliability
problems. Response should
be to design out the causes
of failure.

Time
Is time to failure random?

Meaning it is impossible to
predict statistically when
the system of component
will fail. Failure
Density
The appropriate response is
to run to failure and
monitor the equipment
condition to predict failure.
Time

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Do failures occur due to wear out or old age?

If so then replace the

equipment or components
at preset intervals, i.e. the Failure
replacement should be Density
included in the
maintenance master
schedule at the
appropriate time given by
the equipment history.
Time

This is the typical “bath-tub” curve of system or component reliability.

Determining where each system or component lies on the curve, and therefore the
appropriate maintenance strategy, relies on “Weibull Analysis”, and needs to find much
wider application in the cement manufacturing industry. When this type of analytical
approach to equipment reliability takes hold in the cement industry, along with a much
greater emphasis on machine conditioning monitoring, then the reliability performance of
the industry will improve.

The maintenance people on the cement factory need to focus on machine condition
monitoring and predicting the maintenance needs of the equipment, rather than
responding to compelling events - equipment that won’t start, high bearing temperatures,
low oil pressure…etc.

How will the maintenance people on the cement factory have time to do this and do the
maintenance tasks in the maintenance master schedule and respond to breakdowns of the
equipment? This can only be done by transferring responsibility for all first line
maintenance, inspection, lubrication, equipment adjustment to the production department.
The maintenance people on the cement factory need to focus on “reliability centred
maintenance” (RCM), while the production people take on the responsibility for “total
productive maintenance” (TPM).