September 14, 2018 at 2:18 am
#928212
mark47n
Participant
The “…thing spinning around” is the calcining kiln. It’s a more modern design than the one that has been idled at Lafarge, on the other side of the river, which is around 600′ long. The cyclones on the end help to distribute the heat (around 1900f) to calcine the raw meal, which enters the furnace on the end next to the preheat tower (west end of the kiln). The product is called clinker, which is a fancy word for chunks of cement. These are cooled on a great conveyor and stored until they need to be ground in a ball mill (a large rotating tube filled with various sizes of steel balls ranging from 1.5″ to around 5″).