The commissioning of ABB Ability Expert Optimiser is said to enable Tokuyama to reduce about 3 percent of thermal energy consumption in the kiln as well as maintain operational quality at the Nanyo plant.
Tokuyama manufactures cement at the Nanyo plant which has a clinker production capacity of 4.54 million tonnes per year and supplies customers in Asia and Oceania as well as Japan. The company has invested in a sustainable factory that manufactures cement, incorporating by-products in the Nanyo plant, as well as raw material waste and fuel substitutes mainly from neighbouring areas. All materials are treated in the cement kiln to ensure they are harmless ahead of cement manufacturing.
ABB Ability Expert Optimiser controls and optimises the calciner, kiln, and cooler processes, and will further stabilise production at the Nanyo plant by controlling equipment and function such as induced draft fans, burners, grade speeds in each process.
According to ABB, it is an industrial software based advanced process control solution that enables and automates the best operational decisions accurately and consistently at all times, drawing on linear and non-linear model predictive control, fuzzy logic and neural networks.
Ryota Kakimoto, cement manufacturing dept., Tokuyama, said: “We selected ABB’s Expert Optimiser to equalise the quality of the operation and improve the operational efficiency. As expected, we have significantly reduced the number of the operator manual operations normally spent on manual tasks. Through increased automated operations we can use the time saved for other tasks. We believe that this solution will also support our young operators to learn the know-how of the operation efficiently.”
Hiromichi Yoda, local division manager for Japan, process industries, ABB, said: “Expert Optimiser emulates an operator and provides sharp control with fewer deviations. It is already bringing efficiency and sustainability benefits to production at the Nanyo plant. Although, the timing of the introduction of the system was during Covid-19, we worked remotely between Japan and Switzerland to complete the commissioning, and this was a success with the support of our customer. As part of the ABB Ability portfolio of digital applications, Expert Optimiser supports digital transformation and sustainability aims at customer’s plant.”