Cement Kiln - The Wet Process and The Dry Process

The Wet Process and The Dry Process

From the earliest times, two different methods of rawmix preparation were used: the mineral components were either dry-ground to form a flour-like powder, or were wet-ground with added water to produce a fine slurry with the consistency of paint, and with a typical water content of 40–45%.

The wet process suffered the obvious disadvantage that, when the slurry was introduced into the kiln, a large amount of extra fuel was used in evaporating the water. Furthermore, a larger kiln was needed for a given clinker output, because much of the kiln's length was used up for the drying process. On the other hand, the wet process had a number of advantages. Wet grinding of hard minerals is usually much more efficient than dry grinding. When slurry is dried in the kiln, it forms a granular crumble that is ideal for subsequent heating in the kiln. In the dry process, it is very difficult to keep the fine powder rawmix in the kiln, because the fast-flowing combustion gases tend to blow it back out again. It became a practice to spray water into dry kilns in order to "damp down" the dry mix, and thus, for many years there was little difference in efficiency between the two processes, and the overwhelming majority of kilns used the wet process. By 1950, a typical large, wet process kiln, fitted with drying-zone heat exchangers, was 3.3 x 120 m in size, made 680 tonnes per day, and used about 0.25–0.30 tonnes of coal fuel for every tonne of clinker produced. Before the energy crisis of the 1970s put an end to new wet-process installations, kilns as large as 5.8 x 225 m in size were making 3000 tonnes per day.

An interesting footnote on the wet process history is that some manufacturers have in fact made very old wet process facilities profitable through the use of waste fuels. Plants that burn waste fuels enjoy a negative fuel cost (they are paid by industries needing to dispose of materials that have energy content and can be safely disposed of in the cement kiln thanks to its high temperatures and longer retention times). As a result the inefficiency of the wet process is an advantage—to the manufacturer. By locating waste burning operations at older wet process locations, higher fuel consumption actually equates to higher profits for the manufacturer, although it produces correspondingly greater emission of CO₂. Manufacturers who think such emissions should be reduced are abandoning the use of wet process.