Cemtech Live Webinar: Emissions Control

Hello, and welcome to the Cemtech Live webinar. It's great to be back. My name's Thomas Armstrong, managing editor of International Cement Review, and I'm here to chair this session Cemtech webinars taking place every month in between our live events. we've just come back from Barcelona for Emec Europe. a great event, 300 or so delegates and a big exhibition very much speaking about emissions. But CO2 emissions in particular in, in that webinar in that conference. looking at all the developments that are happening in the European cement industry as we move into the last few months before CBAM starts in January, 2026.

Under the new regime will impose a carbon price for those importing cement and clinker into Europe. but at the same time European cement producers will be paying more for their right to emit CO2. So a lot of big developments are happening in Europe, which will have a profound effect on our industry. so before we get going as I, as usual like to introduce our main products and international cement review, many of you're familiar with the magazine, the monthly magazine that's also available through our website, cnet taking you through every conceivable aspect of the cement industry. and that's a subscription that comes with a free copy of the Cement Plant Operations Handbook.

something that everyone should have a copy of if they're involved in the cement industry or cement plant operations. But do take a look if you're not already a subscriber. this is a, a great product and one that really compliments all of our activities. if you're more interested in the market side of things we track the global cement markets through a variety of products. release this year in January was the cement market outlook monitoring global consumption levels trade and distribution of the top 50 players that comes with an online platform and is a very, a very useful tool for looking at the development of the cement markets.

Like I said, we've just come back from Barcelona, from our Europe conference, and our Middle East conference is the next one up coming next year in February. we'll be visiting Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, a a city that is booming where construction is moving very, very fast. as you will have no doubt read in, in the press. Saudi Arabia is at a, a real inflection point in its development, and there's a lot happening there. So we look forward to being in the Middle East again in February, but for now I'm very pleased to be able to shine a little spotlight onto emissions.

with three presentations, looking at different aspects, we are going to have a speaker from Egypt, from the Arabian Cement Company giving us a, a case study on a ESP filter conversion backhouse conversion that was carried out recently. MAED will be joining us later in the webinar. before that we're gonna hear from Schneider Electric and we're gonna have a, a good overview on their later ai focused technology with two speakers from France and India. delighted to have OSH and Maxim with us. but to kick us off and to give us a, a, a kind of broader perspective on the origins and mitigation of cement kilda missions, I'm really pleased to be able to welcome Dr.

Michael Clark from White Hopman to make a presentation, and I'll allow you to share now, Michael Michael's gonna, is is the founder and managing director of, of white Hopman consultants to the international cement industry. He has more than 40 years experience in the international cement industry working for cement companies and investors from all corners of the globe. Michael's a technical consultant to international cement review and delivers online technical training through the CNET training website. in his current role, he carries out technical and due diligence audits of cement plants, feasibility studies for new projects, and cement project monitoring on behalf of owners and investors.

He's previously held roles with Blue Circle Industries, Sal Kamer, white Cement company, cement Industries and other businesses across the cement industry. A huge source of information. today he's gonna take us through emissions from cement plants. Over to you, Michael. Thank you. Tom. Is, Are you seeing that? Okay. Not yet. I don't know why that you just need to try again on that green share button. Okay. Okay. Share is starting now. Okay. Are you seeing now? And it should just come up right? If you put it into presentation mode, that will be perfect. Okay. Well, good afternoon everybody. Tom's asked me to speak about the origins and mitigation of cement kiln emissions.

Very much an overview and just scratching the surface. No doubt we could talk for many hours about cement kiln emissions. I'm setting the scene. So the control and mitigation of cement k emissions is a growing imperative. As the world's governments, investors, and society become increasingly determined to limit the environmental impact of industry, the levels of emissions that were acceptable in the 20th century, as shown in the picture, are no longer acceptable in the 21st century. Back in the 20th century, dust emissions again, as shown in the photograph in cement kiln exhausts, were the primary focus of emissions control and mitigation.

In the 21st century IE today, the emissions in cement kiln exhausts that must be monitored, controlled, and mitigated, have expanded far beyond dust emissions. In the cement industry, there has always been a strong focus on the productivity and efficiency of cement kilns. So how much clinker is produced per hour, per day, and per year. How much thermal energy is consumed in terms of kiln fuels and electrical energy? In terms of kilowatt towers per ton of clinker produced? In fact, the mass of emissions from a cement kiln are significantly higher than the clinker production rate at the chimney.

With a modern efficiency cement kiln, there will be around 3.25 tons of gaius emissions per ton of clinker produced. So 3.25 times as much gases emission as clinker. Most of that mass of gases emissions is benign and nothing to be concerned about. Around 45% of it is just excess air that has been drawn into the process, heated up and exhausted from the process. That's a significant thermal energy waste, but it's no environmental problem. Historically, this significant, massive of emissions from a cement kiln was nothing to be overly concerned about.

There was no major cost associated with the emissions, beyond the loss of thermal energy from the process that is changing with costs incurred for carbon dioxide emissions and potentially costs in the future for acid gas, heavy metals, and other gaius emissions. If we are going to control and mitigate these cement kiln gaius emissions, we need to understand the cement kiln process from the perspective of the generation of the gaius emissions. So if we consider our clinker manufacturing process, it begins at the raw mill with the material then flowing on through the pre heater, precal signer, rotary kiln, and exiting the kiln system via the cooler as clinker.

Initially, I'm going to consider the inner system of the pre heater precal, rotary kiln and cooler, where the majority of the emissions are generated. So we deliver around 1.65 tons of kiln feed, but ton of clinker produced to the pre heater. Immediately, we lose around N 0.1 tons of dust, but ton of clinker in the emissions due to the pre heater having less than 100% collection efficiency for the feed delivered to the top of the pre heater. I'll just reverse a moment, sorry. So that, that, that dust emission is a significant amount of, of dust to be collected.

If we look at a 5,000 ton per day kiln, similar to the ones which will be talked about from Arabian cement later in the, in the webinar, that's around 20 tons per hour per kiln that must be collected from the emissions Besides the dust, I'm not going to talk about dust anymore in order not to steal the thunder of Arabian cement. Any residual moisture in the kiln feed is lost in the pre heater as emission in the exhaust gas. Also, any sulfides in the kiln feed are oxidized to sulfur dioxide in the pre heater, and again, emitted in the exhaust gases.

Most of this sulfur dioxide generated in the pre heater will be absorbed into the raw mill product in the raw mill and become part of the kiln feed. However, when the raw mill is stopped for maintenance, then the absorption of this carbon of this sulfur dioxide is lost, and it is emitted to atmosphere. This should be mitigated with the injection of calcium hydroxide into the pre heater or with an, with an a sulfur dioxide scrubber. After the dust filter, any traces of heavy metals, such as mercury or thallium in the kiln feed will be ized in the preheat and again, absorbed onto the mill product in a similar way to sulfides and sulfur dioxide generated in the preheat.

If such heav volatile heavy metals are present in the kiln feed, then the, the mitigation is to extract some of the kiln feed and grind it in with the cement finished product to break the cycle of volatile metal between the pre heater and the raw mill. Any organic material in the kiln feed will also be partially oxidized to carbon monoxide or volatize in the pre heater as volatile organic carbon compounds and emitted in the exhaust gas. These will not be absorbed in the raw mill. If organic compounds are present in the kiln feed, then this emission should be mitigated by delivering any raw materials containing organics directly to the precal signer of the kiln.

In the precal signer, the calcium carbonate in the kiln feed is calcine to lime emitting carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide emissions from cement kilns are a huge issue, but not today's topic. These then are the major emissions originating from the kiln feed to a cement kiln fuels are delivered to the precal signer and main burner of the kiln to provide the thermal energy to reach the temperatures required for calcination and clinker combination, and also to drive the endothermic calcination and clinker formation reactions. Organ organics in the fuel are oxidized, IE burnt to more carbon dioxide and water vapor, providing the required calorific value to the kiln.

Sulfur in the fuels is oxidized to sulfur dioxide in the precal, and preheat absorbs this and prevents its emission to atmosphere. Nitrogen compounds in the fuel are oxidized to NOx and will be emitted from the kiln. This NOx emission from cement kilns should be mitigated, but first we need to talk about the air inputs to a cement kiln. The major source of such NOx emissions air is drawn into the rotary kiln and precal from the cooler to provide the oxygen to burn the fuels.

The oxygen in the air is consumed to burn the hydrocarbons in the fuels, while the nitrogen and argon largely pass straight through the kiln as ballast gases at the temperature of more than 1400 degrees centigrade, and a flame temperature of more than 1500 degrees centigrade in the burning zone of the kiln. Some of the nitrogen in the combustion air is also oxidized to NOx. This should be mitigated by flame cooling, staged combustion, selective non catalytic reduction of NOx with ammonia injection or selective catalytic reduction of NOx. Excess air must be drawn into the kiln to operate the kiln in oxidizing conditions.

This hot preheated exhaust passes to the raw mill to dry the raw materials while grinding the raw materials into the kiln feed the evaporated moisture and in leaking air in the raw milling system swell the mass of the exhaust gas at the chimney of the kiln. And that brings me to the close of this presentation on the origins and mitigation of cement K emissions. Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much. A very succinct and comprehensive overview of cement plant emissions excluding of course, CO2. it's you know, obviously a critical part of the industry, a critical part of integrated cement plants. what what do you see as the, as the principle technologies now in, in cement plants being applied?

we're gonna talk a little bit about, about back houses, but maybe if you could talk around some of the, the main, main technologies and, and concerns that cement plant operators have perhaps in the UK as well as a good example. Well, certainly NOx emissions are an increasing focus, demanding mitigation techniques being applied. So selective non catalytic reduction of NOx by ammonia injection has long been adopted in Europe and North America, but I believe this will become more widespread, and indeed, that can only take the NOx emissions down to around 500 parts per million 500 milligrams per normal meter cube of exhaust.

To get below that, we have to start introducing selective catalytic reduction of NOx. If we're thinking about capturing carbon dioxide from those exhaust gases, we certainly have to get rid of the NOx and any SO two. So again, I see, I see, I see technologies such as selective catalytic reduction of NOx being increasingly deployed on cement kilns. Again, we go into carbon capture, the, the whole area of, of emissions mitigation and reducing the emissions ahead of such carbon capture in perhaps in a means or whatever technique technology is deployed are a huge growing topic and will be a very much increasing expense faced by the cement industry.

Yeah, I suppose with carbon capture, you are trying to increase the, the, the content of the CO2 and the gas to make it as pure as possible. You're trying to remove all the pollutants and, and clean that gas to a level of purity that makes it easier and cheaper to to compress and then sequester, or even to go on for onward utilization. Well, for sure. I mean, certainly concentrating the carbon dioxide with something such as oxygen enrichment or, or oxy combustion to concentrate the carbonide in emissions will reduce the overall cost of carbon capture. And then there are very strict specifications for pipeline CO2 or, or, or for storage of the CO2.

And all these tracers have to be remo re removed before the CO2 is acceptable for either geological storage or even more so for use in the food industry. Yeah, absolutely. we have, we've got one, one question, quite specific. One does water injection in GCT towers aid in reduction aid in reducing dust content when the raw mill is off, but the kiln is running? well for sure. Normally that an electrostatic precipitator works in a certain temperature range. If the raw mill isn't running, we'll lose the cooling effect of drying the raw materials in the raw mill. So essentially, we look to replace that cooling effect with the injection of water in the gas conditioning tower.

And we're, we're, we're aiming to keep the conditions in the precipitator in the optimum range for optimum dust collection. So for sure, water injection in the, in the gas conditioning tower is, is intended to improve the dust collection efficiency when the raw mill is not running. Thank you. and just one more question around NOx reduction below 500 milligrams, is it possible with SNCR or to go below 500 or should you opt for SCR?

You probably, I'm sure you can go below 500, you may get down to even two, 300, but if the specifications tighten further and further, there comes a limit to how far you can go with SNCR, and that's when you have to think about, say for instance, the, the no emission limits were reduced to 25 milligrams per normal meter cube. There's no way we would achieve that with SNCR, so then you would need to be looking at options such as SCR. Sure. Very good. Okay, thank you, Michael. that's an excellent introduction and I think very clear. if you're interested in, in more of that kind of knowledge and expertise, then I can just direct you to CNET e-learning.

you can go onto the website, cnet.com and you'll see we have a several courses addressing every aspect of cement plant operations and cement production. And I think you can you can, you can sign up to our e-learning courses and, and go through any aspect that you are, that you are interested in. So do check out simnet e-learning all the courses of designed and written by Michael and you have his live input as well, so well worth checking out. Okay. I'm gonna introduce our next speakers, and I'm really pleased to be able to welcome back Schneider Electric and we've got two speakers today.

OSH Dave is a seasoned expert in the cement industry, automation and energy optimization, with over three decades of experience spanning maintenance, engineering, and digital transformation. Currently serving as a global cement solutions architect and consultant, Schneider Electric, OSH has been instrumental in driving end-to-end digitization and decarbonization across cement operations worldwide. And he's joined by Maxim Ramel Wadel, who many of you have will know from attending Semtex especially recently in Barcelona. He's a seasoned global sales leader with over 15 years of experience in the cement industry, an engineer at heart.

He successfully initiated cutting edge technology applications that drive business growth and enhance customers operational efficiency and profitability. He's committed to driving sustainable business results and shaping the future of the industry towards net zero emissions. Okay. Well, very pleased to welcome you both to present your green cement transformation. Thank you, Thomas. And thank you everyone for joining this very interesting webinar. So we are Schneider Electric. We are a global company working into energy management and industrial automation.

We are generating 38 billion euro of turnover yearly with 150,000 people, and we are very proud for the third year consecutively to be nominated as the world's most sustainable company. Nobody, we expect that with this background experience and achievement, we are able to inform you and transfer some knowledge on the particular topic of green cement transformation, especially with the ambition to reduce emission through digitization, artificial intelligence and electri electrification, right? Yes.

So I'm Maxi Ramal, and I'm, I am the Green seventh global business developer at Schneider Electric, and I'm here to support you to enable the transformation of your company towards more sustainability, digitization, and electrification. Our purpose is to empower, is to empower all, to make the most of our energy and resources bridging progress and sustainability. For all Schneider, we call it, life is all our mission is to be your digital partner for sustainability and efficiency. If you are here today, it's because you understand that cement is a critical material that is widely used across the world, and that is needed for many applications.

It's a critical material because we need it for energy infrastructure, we need it for transportation infrastructure, we need it for our buildings, and it's a great material because it's widely available. it's affordable, it's easy to use. And in controversy to what we are talking today, it's very low emitting product per unit if you compare to the competing material that is still glass, ceramic or all the others. So this incredible material that we know has also some challenge. And one of its challenge is the volume that we use that generate a high amount in absolute value of CO2, which represent today more than 7% of the global CO2 emissions.

However, we see a trend in the industry and in the user that are requesting more green solutions to build their facilities, building and infrastructure. We are also seeing the competition that is getting more active onto that field, trying to get their business enterprise and the purpose more sustainable, green and digital, your stakeholder. So the people that are working with us, the people that are working with you, they need more purpose. They want to work in for more sustainable company, the shareholder you have, they want to invest in company that are getting more green and they are more relevant for the environment.

Ultimately, we see that the market globally is, is asking for more green product. So we, we expect, we estimate that by 2050 25% of cement will be required to be green, right? So I would start with a, let's say, generic and conceptual presentation about the artificial intelligence use, and then for, so for sustainability and reduction of emissions. And then my colleague OSH would go in much more detail with some specific applications. Schneider Electric, we have been working in semi industry for the last 30 years, let's say. And we have experience in different ways to approach sustainability, decarbonation, and the different warm ups that you and your customers are applying to the industry.

We see different range of engagements toward more decarbonation, you, the, the customer that I, that are implementing efficiency measure that will help to increase by five to 15% their emission reduction by probably implementing some digital solution for control system, A PC mechanical improvement of their solutions. Then you have the next step, which is much, which, which, which comes with a, a higher level of investment, for example, with a double HIS or retrofit for making your plant ready for CCUS which will help your company to reduce by 15 to 30% of their emission. But we can already see here that the techn technological maturity is not always at the required level.

And then we have the major investment that you were mentioning before, Tomas, the CCUS, the, the carbonation electrification, which might support reduction of the emission between 30 to 50%. But here again, the maturity of the technology is not at the required, they say demonstrated level, and we are here together to make it happen, to mature the technology and to enable those solution to be implemented in the required timeframes. There are different solutions that we have at Schneider Electric that serve the complete value chain of the seven industry, from, from, from the query to the seven bags, and even further to the concrete station, and even further to the building, right?

So we have different software solutions that help you to manage different topics of, of the plant from the design and building to the operation, to the asset management, predictive maintenance to the energy management and, and electricity electricity management process and energy management as well. We see Schneider Electric because we've been across this journey from the last 40 years, let's say, the transformation of our business, especially during the last 15 years actually, where we transform our company towards more digital and sustainable.

It's coming from, it's coming through integration, and we've seen five key integration that are helping efficiency, and therefore we believe that efficiency and integration must go hand in head. For example, the first the first pillar that we see is the fact to join energy and automation at Schneider Electric. We call it power and process. We believe that this is ga giving you the full efficiency of your asset, managing your process together with your energy needs. The second one is what we call the digital continuity, where we are seeing a good progress into efficiency when you link the digital data of your, of your enterprise from the endpoint.

So the actually the point where it starts the manufacturing machine, for example, the sensor up to the cloud and vice versa, communication between the entire value chain of the data, which we call data continuity. Then the third one is the, let's say digital digitization, the conceptual digitalization of the, of the design and the operation and maintenance. So what we call digital twin.

So the fact two gamify somehow the process and the, and and the enterprise to accelerate the time artificially and being able to define scenarios, being able to access data through digital twin so kind of avatar of your, of your plant and interact with it in a more let's say convenient, convenient way that than going through drawings, papers and so on. Right? We also believe that the fact together sites together in regions in clusters also help to gather data, to gather knowledge and to share them at the same times.

So the, the fourth pillar is mainly on the on the integration of the units and the, and the last one is about the supply, is about the supply chain, making sure that we move from opportunistic supply chain to something more integrated and sustainable. There are different trends that we see in the semi industry to cope with. decarbonation, there is energy efficiency, alternative fuel process, heat optimization, electrification, real-time process control, productivity with environmental regulation, carbon capture and so on. You did the industry is doing any is doing it with Schneider Electric at the moment.

But we believe that with artificial intelligence, we can help you to make it more efficiently, quicker with your expected deadlines and with a lower budget to be invested. So all your, the actions that you have in mind to decarbonize your business, we believe that we can help you to implement them with artificial intelligence tools, depending the, the, the, the, the initiative that you are taking to deploy it and to execute it in a, in a linear way. We understand the decarbonation action you have to underst to undertake. There is different ways to, to reduce your emission. First, just by being efficient, you might reduce your energy consumption, your raw material, use your gas emission.

Then by replacing the existing fossil fuel or material, you also limit the impact you, you are generating on the environment. you can then balance by buying some credit offset carbon offsetting of, of your automation. And then by optimizing the value and the supply chain of your plant for each of of the, of those four topics, we have a solution for you. So that's what we mentioned when we say that we are engaged in the full value chain of the cement plant, it goes from all the topics, from the technology to the governance and management of the company, right? yeah. And so when it comes to ai, what is the value creation?

We have a methodology in Schneider Electric that, that goes on the three pillar, which is the evaluation, the optimization, and the achievement, which never ceases to turn around, right? It's a continuous improvement cycle where we first evaluate the energy efficiency improvement, the potential, and the estimated real time saving that can be generated, the optimization by defining optimum targets that are calculated in real time and the achievement. So a close loop using constraint to achieve the optimal targets, measuring what we have been actually doing. And this never cease. So it help us to really decrease the energy consumption from the baseline.

Then we optimize it, and then we optimize it further through AI after learning from the optimization. And this is done with our internal tools that we have from the artificial intelligence and machine learning, the soft sensors and the advanced optimization. With that, I will give you, I give the floor to my colleagues, OSH, who we go further on to that topic. Thank you Maxim. And you can go to the next slide, please. I would like to save upon time and to emphasize what Maxim was trying to explain.

it's the metrics which shows that how different use cases and solutions are able to reduce the overall CO2 emission, because each of this pillar is quite important, like energy efficiency, alternative fuel injection, wasted recovery, carbon capture, sifting to a alternative material technology and fully electrifying the technology. However, these all requires various support while transition from normal traditional technology to green technology. That is the area where Schneider can really help innovating the transition. over to next slide, please.

And how we do this is through various percentage wise in depth calculation on how much of the impact, if it is a brownfield or a greenfield project, each of this lever, each of this pillar will be able to contribute like when renewable source of energy is going to be used, how much of CO2 is being curved, what would be the impact of feeding more alternative fuels against the fossil fuel and how it is going to reduce in percentage to abbit the overall CO2 emission. What kind of energy could be captured through wasted recovery and modeling the energy where the optimization is calculated based on the overall energy consumption portion of clinker or cement.

And, and that is where each small component is adding to it by recovering at various places. And, and that is where the minimal usage of the thermal heat is something which is going to help us in the complete lifecycle management and how do we reduce the overall CO2 emission. Next slide, please. This is something which we try to do it with the help of a comprehensive energy management and optimization method where we try to see each and every component to see how this can really help the kind of ratio which a FR and polarized coal is being manipulated, the kind of heat which is extracted, minimizing the feed deviation, improving overall grinding efficiency.

But all these control variables have to be in such a way that they need to be predicted. They need to be suggested by a overarching tool, which we call it as a LP optimizer sitting on top of all these process sections. But they are suggestive systems, which will be able to control at a edge layer. And, and that is how we are trying to overall manage the energy. And for that, what we require is a power and process integrated architecture. Next slide, please.

This is that architecture which we try to deploy and manage the energy and process together where each of the network is synchronized and in real time, we have the information which are passing from the electrical network to the process control network. And they are cyber secured at all instances because these are the parameters and informations which we generally try to share between the plants also, because a lot of customization between the plants is something which is going to help us because the data needs to be picked up from various sources. And on that, we try to create the models. Next slide, please.

So, in short, when we are trying to achieve all this autonomous operation where we, the focus remains always reduce the energy, reduce the CO2 emission without sacrificing the quality and try to achieve the maximum productivity, various use cases have been designed, developed, and tested, which are operationalized, and we are in the process of generating the proof of concept for each of them, like how NOx behavior and predicting can help us, how free line detection, how LSF could help us to achieve a better quality, how we are able to achieve a better blame control. And, and these are various types of models which we have devised, and those are based on each of the individual AI use cases.

please go to the next slide, Maxim. Next slide. One more click. So in short, what we are trying to say that this are the critical assets along with the asset management during the operational cycle, the optimization is something which becomes very key and crucial because that's like a integration of it OT converging at a network layer, and informations are securely passed from one network to another network. Next slide please. We see there are several challenges, and these are the areas where AI is playing a vital critical role.

Consistent raw material, consistent operation and processes, identifying unsafe operations and environmental impacts, asset reliability and failures, end-to-end visibility of the production business and energy consumption, impact of weather on the quality. These are major, which we have seen as a challenge, and on each of them we are trying to resolve using various kind of sampling. And this is what we try to do using ai metrics. can we go to the next slide?

In short, what we do is without control the measurement with control, the measurement, the targets are tracked, and then there is a predictive control, which has a impact with the neural network information analyzed and the energy consumption and carbon footprints are both optimized together. Also at the same time, we also try to see that there is a reduction in the downtime and off quality products are rejected as well as not produced. This is where the impact really is in overall reduction of the CO2 at a total level of production over the entire cycle or period where we are measuring it. next slide please. So what we try to do is insert the next slide, yeah.

In, in, in insert the learning model inside the closed loop. And this is called like E-P-R-B-S, which is a pseudo random binary system. We are including a collection of the data and analyzing to generate the step test to increase this generation of the step test. we insert it at a regular interval, and this is what, which makes the model more accurate closer to the requirement of the process. Next slide, please. In, in short, the artificial neural network is something which is predicting at a different level where large language models are monitoring the quality impacts.

And if there are something which is identified, the need arises is to different control loops to run with the different instantaneous gains. So that is what makes it more practical and closer to the process requirement. That's how we try to power the AI inside the process operation, and that makes it more autonomous. Next slide, please. And, and while doing this, there are several issues we try to face, like dust kill, there could be some sort of vibrations, more co and, and in this, the stabilizing the operation fuel switching are some requirements which needs to run special d ls or switch on and off the process, sometimes increase or decrease the process needs.

And, and that is what we are trying to achieve through Python scripting and switching this model very fast. But the neural network, which plays a very key vital role over here. Yeah. Yeah, it's okay. go to the next slide. And the autonomous control actions are something like interface to the various systems, pre and post data logging and collection, turning on and off the controller in its required manner, customized calling of the external source because the waste recovery could also be connected with the steam table to link it with that and try to optimize at the best level possible. Next slide, please. These are some of the examples.

Looking at the time constraints I would not go in more detail, but we have these kind of several examples where we have deployed this POCs are going on, some cases are still under deployment, and that's how we try to agile the AI based process optimization. Thank you. And over to you, Thomas. Thank you very much for that great presentation. and you, you were, you, you were talking a little bit about opportunities for reducing NOx peaks. can you talk a little bit more around that? We've got a little bit of time without our third speaker here. how the how the software is able to, to, to deliver those kind of improvements? Yeah, it's, it's, it's something about continuously tracking the results.

The NOx levels are being monitored through the gas analyzers, and whenever we see this are hampering the process, there is a neural network, which is a algorithm which keeps on predicting the next layer of NOx, which is going to impact the process. And when the models see that it is going to increase on a higher side, that is where we try to control the process in such a way. And the control actions are taken over the control loops, so that what is going to increase is actually in a reduced fashion seen by the operator. That's, that's where the key is to reduce the NOx level. and what, and, and what does it do to reduce the NOx level?

And once it's, once it's read, once the readings for, for NOx peaks are, are, are received w what is it doing? Is it, is it working with the advanced pro? yes. It, it's working with control System to, It's working with the advanced process control and advanced process optimization control is something which is trying to switch the switch, the controlling parameters and the gains are existed so that the loop parameters are switched to a different model. Okay. And so that will engage whatever the NOx reduction system is in the plant. maybe that's a ammonia or, or, or, or something in order to re reduce the, the NOx peaks. okay. So so that's very interesting. pa is it, it's a package.

I mean, I, when, can you talk us a little bit through the what is required to install this kind of technology and how it behaves over time? I mean, is there some kind of calibration or learning period and what happens if the plant is changing fuels or raw, raw mix or there are some fundamental changes? how does the system cope with that? It's, it's not one system or it's, it's a customized solution every time. we normally go with a consultative approach. We try to analyze the specific plant, and when the plant pain point source plant specific requirements are understood, then it is related with the benefit calculation.

And if the benefit estimations are as per the required customer, ROI, then they are deployed. And, and that is where the different systems are suggested to adapt. And we try to meet the ROI based on that. Okay. Very good. Well, thank you very much. really, really delighted to have you here today making this presentation. Thank you to Michael Clark as well. we had hope to bring you Arabian Cements presentation on the ESP conversion, but I'm afraid personal issues have made that not possible this time. So what we suggest is that we will bring that presentation to you at the next webinar, which will be in a month's time.

and we do have the slides so we can also send those out for those of you who are, who are interested. But that's it for today. Thank you for joining us. thanks to our speakers, Dr. Michael Clark from White Hoffman max Siemen osh just now from Schneider. we we greatly appreciate your participation and time and look forward to hearing more about your products in the future. that's all for now. We will we'll be back in four weeks time. for our webinar, we'll be looking mainly at low clinker cements with a number of great different people. So we are looking forward to that.

And in the meantime, please get in touch or you'll receive this, the slides by email and you'll be able to contact the speakers directly. Thank you, Thomas. And, and thank you all for attending. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Thomas. Bye now.