Cement is a building material that is needed in large quantities, but unfortunately does not grow on trees. It is created through numerous steps such as raw material extraction in the quarry, material processing, production of raw meal and clinker and finally takes its final form in the cement mill. The cement industry faces major social challenges: Not only does it have to meet the high demand for cement, but as the main source of greenhouse gases it also has to comply with new environmental regulations and optimally manage the enormous amount of energy required for its production.

The Central Franconian cement manufacturer was able to achieve the greatest effects of digitalization in its vertical roller mills, as they are the central machines within its cement production chain: they crush the raw material required to produce the cement for the kiln meal and grind the clinker produced in the kiln with the addition of additives. Not only does this process require an enormous amount of energy, the mills are also subject to considerable wear and tear. The cement plant was threatened witha deterioration in performance, unexpected downtime and a shortened service life for its machines.
For this reason, it was important to identify the optimum operating parameters for these mills as a first step. To this end, elunic equipped the cement plant with state-of-the-art hardware and software solutions to collect data on each individual plant component and use it in the cloud for data analysis. The cement plant in central Franconia was then able to specify guideline values for certain control variables, such as throughput, availability, quality, energy efficiency and smooth running, which, through continuous learning by artificial intelligence , bring the mill operation closer to its optimum state and which could be dynamically adapted to changing operating conditions. In this way, the cement manufacturer always achieves the optimum operating point for its vertical roller mills.

Thanks to intelligent, data-based control, the cement plant in Middle Franconia can not only fine-tune the individual, optimum performance conditions of its mills and thus improve their performance. The new digital solutions have also had an impact on the availability of its machines. The cement manufacturer is now able to use intelligent sensors to monitor the load collectives that occur when grinding the raw material and clinker and generate corresponding alarms in the event of load anomalies. The IoT technologies implemented by elunic for this purpose continuously measure the actual load during operation and identify the design limits of the mills in real time based on this database . If the Central Bavarian cement company is informed of deviations in machine utilization as part of its anomaly analysis, it can react quickly to these anomalies long before actual problems occur. The benefits for the cement industry are obvious: reducing the power requirements of the mills, avoiding machine damage and subsequent unexpected downtime and extending their life cycle. The data also provides information on when the mills need to be serviced and which redundancy systems need to be switched on in this case, as well as when a machine replacement will be necessary(predictive maintenance).