摘要：Material flow in each main equipment of a cement clinker plant, which is very useful forcontrolling the process, is impossible to be measured during operation due to very high temperatures.This paper intends to overcome the difficulties associated with the measurement of these materialflow values. This study presents a new method of calculating material flow (gas and solid) in eachmain equipment of a single string conventional suspension preheater type of a cement clinker plant.Using the proposed method, mass flow rate at a clinker cooler, kiln, suspension preheater (SP) andeven each cyclone separator can be calculated with a heat conservation error less than 1 %. Withthe application of the least square method for solving the overdetermined system of mass and heatconservation equations obtained in the cyclones of SP, the flow of gas and solid materials enteringand exiting each cyclone that cannot be measured directly in the operating plant can be approached.Based on the operation temperature data of gas and solid flows monitored in the control room of anIndonesian cement plant as a case study, the mass flow rate of gas and solid entering and exiting aswell as separation efficiency of each cyclone can be calculated. The results show that the separationefficiencies of cyclones 1, 2, 3 and 4 are 95 %, 91.89 %, 84.09 % and 79.51 % respectively. Finally, thisstudy will be very useful by providing data that are impossible to gather by a direct measurement inan operating plant, due to a very high process temperature constraint, for operational control needs,new equipment design, process simulation using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software andeven modification of existing equipment. The proposed method can be applied to all types of moderncement clinker plant configurations, either with or without a calciner including the double strings.
