Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Prasunjit Sengupta
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
In memory of my parents.
Preface
The idea of this book came during my visit to the cement plants in India. In the
course of the discussion with process engineers, I found a lot of misconception
people were carrying about refractory. For example, people in operation think that
the best quality of refractory should have very high cold crushing strength. The other
things encountered in my numerous visits to the different cement plants include the
fact that any premature campaign life of refractories are always attributed to the qual-
ity of refractories only, whereas the statistics say that most of the problems related to
refractory are associated either with the defective installation of refractories or with
operational problems.
This mostly happens because in cement industries, the process people mostly
have a background of either chemical or mechanical engineering and normally, at
least in India, the refractory is not a part of the curriculum, as a subject, in either of
the courses. On the other hand, although refractory plays a very crucial role in the
successful operation of a cement plant, due importance is not attributed to refrac-
tory, as a subject, possibly because cost wise, it is not very significant, compared to
total cement plant operational cost, although the refractory problem can cause heavy
production losses to a cement industry. In fact, very few cement companies employ
ceramic or refractory engineers to look after its refractory-related issues.
I do hope that this book will be useful to all the process and maintenance people,
especially the non-ceramic or non-material science graduates, as a guide, to make
them understand what are the characteristics of refractory products and its require-
ments of properties for use in different cement plant equipment, like TAD, cooler,
kiln, etc. The book has addressed all the related topics, like selection criteria of
refractories, the effect of operational parameters on the refractory performances,
installation methods of the different types of refractories, and the aspects of quality
control of installation and how the inspection should be carried out to ensure the
acceptance of the material with defect percentage within tolerable limit.
A chapter has been dedicated to the manufacturing aspects of the Portland
cement which will be helpful for the refractory researcher or technologists engaged
in the development and manufacturing of refractories for the cement industries, to
vii
viii Preface
Prasunjit Sengupta
pseng4311@gmail.com
Nagpur, India
Contents
ix
x Contents
Glossary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 229
Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 233