Commitment to the fully-automated cement laboratory concept: a cement industry trend whose time has come

In the modern cement plant, there is the challenge to balance production efficiency and quality to meet internal and international requirements for standards. Focus is concentrated on the process, rather than the individual job units. Defined in this way, a process is a sequence of activities which provide value and quality to meet production goals. At most innovative companies, the drive to achieve this balance relies on state-of-the-art technology and maintaining a level of quality consistency from plant to plant. Productivity, which is the underpinning of consistent process operations, is effectively maximized by means of automation. A potentially complicating factor in meeting this objective is that there is usually a combination of existing, relatively new plants and a number of older plant operations which are in various stages of upgrading. The level of sophistication of equipment and integration of several generations of technology represents a rather formidable obstacle to achieving the objective of consistency of integration and production quality control. Nowhere is this more important than in the area of automation of the cement plant production laboratory.