Cement Industry - The PYR Plasma Torch Advantage Good Morning All,
What a lousy day overall in the market place. The Dow is down approx. 1125 pts.as I write. BUT there is PYR basically holding steady in sp but still @ excellent ' Gift ' pricing. Still very good/very good sign too compared to the general market conditions
. Appears, maybe that the Shorters are thinking twice before selling any more of ' what they don't own !! ' If I was in their shoes, fair to say, I would be more than just very very worried.
In all of this, keep in mind, PYR is still an essential service. A very very good place to be in, in these chaotic covid times.
In the mean time, just some more info. to mull about on the subject of plasma torches in the Huge cement industry. The advantages of PYR plasma torch usage in this industry is many. & of significance both for the customer & PYR. In terms, easy to understand , $$$$$$. All good for All.
Evaluation of usage of plasma torches in cement production A heat transfer modelling study Master’s thesis in Master Programme Sustainable Energy Systems TOVE BURMAN JOHANNA ENGVALL
Department of Space, Earth and Environment CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Gothenburg, Sweden 2019
Plasma torches have various industrial applications within mechanical, chemical and metallurgical processing. Several applications are mentioned in literature, including: cutting and welding, evaporation, refining, surface treatment, gas-heating, plasma synthesis, sintering, fine-powder preparation and plasma waste-treatment.
An advantage of replacing conventional burners with plasma torches, other than decreased greenhouse gas emissions from replacing combustion, is that the operating costs can decrease, according to a comparison performed by L. Rao, F. Rivard and P. Carabin [17] on a 2 MW fuel oil burner and a 2 MW air plasma torch. They state several reasons why the operating costs are lower, including decreased costs of heat production due to fuel consumption being replaced by cheaper electricity. Secondly, no more handling and extraction of fuels would be necessary, meaning less process equipment utilisation and manpower. Thirdly the volumetric flow of gas could decrease which means that the cost of off-gas treatment decreases. A plasma does not contaminate the process environment and therefore ensures a high purity of the product. Implementing plasma torches in the cement production process could lead to a significant decrease in CO2 emissions, as well as emissions of other undesired compounds, such as CO, from combustion, and be the first step towards a cement industry free from CO2 emissions. Making the entire cement industry free from CO2 emissions from combustion would mean a decrease of 916 Mt CO2 /year, 40% of the total annual emissions. If CCS were to be implemented as well it would mean a decrease of 2.8 Gt CO2 /year. By removing combustion the produced NOx from the fuel would be eliminated, but at the high temperatures of the plasma process, NOx could instead form from nitrogen gas in the air. In order to have no emissions of NOx, there can be no air leakage since a pure plasma gas without any nitrogen or oxygen is required. Compounds like H2S and SOx, would not form either due to them arising from the fuel as well. Therefore gas cleaning would not be necessary, not considering cleaning steps required for CCS, and those operational costs would decrease.
The CCS technology considered as addition to plasma torches is post-combustion capture. If plasma torches with CO2 as working gas are implemented the gas flow would be very clean, and separation of CO2 would not require as much energy and process steps as it would if another gas was used
Plasma Modelling
Based on the result of plasma modelling it appears to be a possible option to consider replacing the current burners with plasma torches. However, the results reached depend on the gas temperature profile used as input data. To validate these results, modelling or calculations would need to be performed on the gas temperature profile, to see if this profile can be achieved with the installed effect used. If not, a larger effect would need to be tested.
Conclusion
The results of modelling plasma torches indicated that it is feasible to replace the fuel burners with plasma torches in the rotary kiln. To validate this result, calculations on the gas temperature profile in the kiln need to be performed to investigate if the required temperatures can be reached.
To improve the validity of the results from plasma modelling, the gas temperature profile used as input data needs to be correct. This could be achieved either by performing measurements with small scale plasma torches and scaling up the results, or by performing detailed modelling using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling of the gas phase temperature.
Note PYR CEO response to posted on Jun 09, 2020 10:52PM
Without divulging to much: this seems to be well in hand.
Best wishes All, good health,
Good Fortune,
Sincerely,
Topseeker