25 years at Idea Cement plant in Devils Slide Utah

From my 25 years in the Devils Slide Utah  Ideal cement plant I will try to help you with your cement plant.  The first 5 years I was a miller (mill operator) running the raw and finish mills. Then a few months in the pack house bagging and loading sacked cement. About 10 years driller and powder man, quarry truck driver, plus dozer operator on the quarry followed by 10 years repairman, part of it shift repairman. 

Raw materials include limestone rock, sandstone rock and iron ore .They usually use iron slag which is waste material from steel production. The plant I worked in built in 1946 was wet process and use water in the raw mills and pumped the slurry to tanks at the feed end of the kilns.

The fire in the 2 ten foot diameter  kiln was about 2400 degrees which makes cement clinker which drops into a drag chain conveyor then up a bucket elevator, dumped into a slide to go outside where it is moved to piles to cool with either the bridge crane or front end loader.

Cool clinker is then put in the bin above the feed away and gypsum from another bin and feed away both drops onto the belt conveyor to the finish mill which is about  half full of steel balls grinds it into cement.(Noise is only 90 to 100 DBs).  Exiting the mill it is returned to the feed end in a screw conveyor up a bucket elevator to the separator where course particles are rejected to the finish mill feed end. The fine particles drop to a FK pump and are blown by air in a pipe to the silos where it is stored according to type..

From the silo to the truck or rail hopper car it is moved in a screw conveyors (and bucket elevators if necessary).. If bagged it moves in screw conveyor, up a bucket elevator into a bin then blown with air into the sacks. I forgot the name of that machine as the last time I used it was about 1977.

The new dry process plant uses a preheater tower but the old plant that was used up until about 2000 did not have one

. Rail traffic in can include coal for the kiln fire, iron ore or slag  and gypsum besides cement out. Devils Slide has a new higher grade limestone quarry that is trucked about 4 miles to the plant now and mixed in with the other quarries.. One cement plant in Nebraska had a 5 mile long belt conveyor from the quarry in across the state line Kansas.  Someone could also bring limestone or sandstone by rail too by use of modelers license. 

   Kimberley-Clark the diaper manufacture had a lot of waste material and found it was cheaper to run the waste material though a hay cuber and haul it 45 miles to Devils Slide than the tipping fees at the landfill. Also the tire recycling system started shredding tires which were delivered to the cement plant for use in the kilns. At times the fire had diaper cubes, shredded tires, coal and natural gas feeding it. The use of tires changed the amount of iron needed to make the cement do to the wires in the tires..

I left the cement plant in 97 and did not work in the new one but the old finish mills put in 1946 are still used .They removed the old raw mills and put more finish mills in.

Warren

One other idea if you can't find a blast furnace kit.

You could make it a ready mix dealer instead of a cement plant.  It could receive loads of cement in covered hoppers, Load cement mixers and also receive sand and gravel from open hoppers that would drop the load and then have it sent into piles from a portable conveyer. 

There was ready mix dealer off a street running between Santa Fe Ave. & Alameda street in South Central Los Angeles near where the company I worked for used to be until the company I worked for sold the property and moved to a bigger place in City of Industry.  As far as I know the ready mix place is still there.  It is on a street parallel to Alameda Street, but two or three streets south of Alameda street.

They received their aggregate in open hoppers that dropped the aggregate between the rails into a hole that fed a conveyer which then brought the aggregate up and put it in pile around the yard where front end loaders would pick up the aggregate as needed for the various concrete formulas that the plant made up for customers depending on spec.  I think they had a spur that ran alongside of the silos for cement hoppers to unload into, but they may have received the cement from bulk trailers in semi's since there are a lot of cement plants in western Riverside & San Bernardino counties.  A lot of the gravel was brought in from Irwindale about 20 miles from L.A.

I'm not sure where all of the aggregate came from, but I saw it unloaded from bottom drop gondolas or open top hopper cars.