Part 1
The LIME sector and the age of the INDUSTRIAL INTERNET — part 1
Over the past 200 years, the world has experienced two major innovations: the industrial revolution and the digital and internet revolution. First came the industrial revolution, where machines and factories, railways and electricity, changed the lives of the masses. Then the digital and internet revolution brought us computing power, data networks, communication and unprecedented access to information.
The industrial internet
The industrial internet is the integration of complex physical machinery with networked sensors, intelligent analytics and people at work. Industrial machinery, including that used in the lime industry, is being increasingly equipped with electric sensors that allow them to see, hear and feel more than ever. This results in quicker generation of data and increasingly sophisticated analysis, which provides insights that allow operators to use a machine in entirely new ways, and in a more efficient manner. This technology can be used in the lime industry in entire plants for calcination, hydration, milling and any other industrial aggregate.
Electric sensors have, of course, been around for some time; however, sales have increased markedly over the past few years due to declining costs and the technological advances in cloud computing. This has resulted in a rise in the remote availability of data, the virtualisation of entire IT infrastructures and a rapid decrease in costs of data storage. Due to technology such as this, machinery is not just intelligent, it is self aware, predictive, reactive, as well as social.
In a lime plant, this means that equipment such as the belt conveyors and bucket elevators, stone sizing and distribution systems, firing systems and emission analysers, quicklime storage, trucks and trains for quicklime delivery, and all the other machinery, is capable of communicating with each other and with the plant operators.
New technology
QualiCal was the first Italian company registered to the Industrial Internet Consortium™ (IIC), a global nonprofit partnership of industry, government and academia. The IIC was founded in March 2014 to bring together the organisations and technologies necessary to accelerate growth of the industrial internet by identifying, assembling and promoting best practices. Membership includes small and large technology innovators, vertical market leaders, researchers, universities and governments.
With 20 years of experience in the lime market, QualiCal has developed methods of incorporating new technology brought about by the industrial internet into a plant setting. QualiCal identified Parallel Flow Regenerative (PFR) technology as the best suited for the calcination process in vertical lime kilns. For this reason, the company implemented the technology in the design of its Synthesis® Twin Shaft lime kiln. At present, more than 20 Synthesis kilns are in operation worldwide and a further 20 new kiln projects are underway, ranging from the smallest Synthesis 40 (capacity: 150–200 tpd) to the largest Synthesis 145 (capacity: 800 tpd). Furthermore, QualiCal has developed QualiCUBE®, a unique and original plug and play solution for quicklime hydration, hydrated lime classification and grinding and lime sizing.
QualiCUBE® Modular Plant.
Increasing efficiency and reducing downtime
The PFR production process itself is very stable; however, most kiln or hydration plant stoppages are due to breakdown maintenance events and unexpected problems, which can result in increased production costs for the operator and a decrease in the quality of the final products. Issues such as this can also have an impact on the onsite team in terms of stress and urgency to promptly solve the problem.
The industrial internet allows plant operators to increase efficiency and reduce downtime by implementing preventative maintenance. QualiCal has developed the MOSAICO platform, a suite of applications that can be installed in any lime plant to analyse and predict certain issues that could be overlooked by human operators. In essence, the lime plant is communicating with the technicians and the maintenance team; even when production is running smoothly, the team knows which areas need to be attended to.
