Modelling of clinker cooler and evaluation of its performance in clinker cooling process for cement plants

Cement manufacturing requires cooling down of hot clinker at temperature of about 1350o C to temperature lower than 100 o C in a cooling system known as clinker cooler. Many plants are unable to cool the clinker below 250o C. This challenge led to scaling down of actual clinker cooler to a test rig size in the ratio 25:1 suitable for simulation. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools (Solid-Works and ANSYS) were used to achieve the simulation. The clinker outlet temperatures obtained from simulations were validated with theoretical evaluation. Results showed that with clinker and cooling air flow rates of 0.2 kg/s and 0.54 kg/s respectively and with a clinker bed height of 0.6 m. An optimum cooler performance was achieved with clinker outlet temperature of 68 oC. The scaled down cooler was 15% higher than the existing cooler in terms of recoverable energy and 10% high in terms of energy efficiency. Keywords: Clinker Cooler, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Mass flow rate clinker and Mass flow air and Clinker Furnace.