Our facility operates two Humboldt air-swept ball mills for raw meal production. Combined capacity is 100tph. We would like to optimise the raw meal circuit, in particular, mill loading. Unfortunately, there appears to be very little information on the optimisation of air-swept mills. How can mill throughput be improved, utilising existing equipment? The separator is a mechanical classifier, with adjustable vanes. Current reside set point is 15 per cent on 90 micron. We currently use sonic ears to determine mill loading, with mill and fan current also available. There is also a proposal to implement a grit return weigh system to determine the recirculating load. Would this be worthwhile addition, with any positive process benefits? In summary, we wish to determine the most cost effective means of attaining optimal material levels in the milling circuit, with the intention of automating the operation sometime in the future.

If you are adequately controlling the kiln feed residues to 15 per cent I am not sure what the grit return weigher is going to tell you. Will you be able to remotely adjust the vanes of the mechanical separator from the control room while the mill is running? If not I would suggest periodic sampling and measuring residues around the circuit is all you need to do to determine the rejects rate. What do you mean by "optimise" the raw mills? Do you need more raw mix output? Is there sufficient drying capacity in the mills? I presume they are swept by preheater exhaust gases?

We have a VSK unit with 300tpd production. The raw mix contains limestone, clay, cokebreeze. We are getting continuously high free lime. Please advice the procedure through which we can reduce the free lime.

There are a number of reasons why you might be getting continuously high free lime in your clinker. The most likely ones are: (i) there is too much limestone in your raw mix, (ii) the raw mix is not ground to sufficient fineness, or (iii) the temperature in the kiln is not high enough to finally combine the free lime with the clay minerals. The problem might be a combination of all these factors.