Hi Middleborder, I’ve automated a couple of cement plants and have a bit of experience with kiln controls. Kilns are not complex mechanically but the controls are involved and very specialized. I suspect the delay has been delivery of one or more specialty monitoring devices. With cement kilns, to produce clinker the raw materials are heated in a multiple stage heater and then fed into the kiln which raises their temperature to approximately 2500 degrees when the clinker leaves the kiln it is cooled and the heat is returned to the kiln for efficiency. The combustion, flue gas and hot particle monitoring was critical and complex. The hot particle monitoring that I am familiar with needed high-resolution monitoring across approx 750 temperature spots. These processes required several very specialized monitoring devices, and very few were off the shelf and some only had a couple of choices for suppliers. They may not need quite as complex of controls for a pilot plant, but I bet it is still very specialized. Under normal conditions some of these devices had long lead times. Now with chip shortages, labor shortages and other supply chain issues I imagine scheduling the delivery of these devices would be difficult.
These are very unusual times and the original time estimates certainly appear overly optimistic. It sounds like the parts are in hand and hopefully just need to be installed, configured, integrated and shipped. I think there will most likely be another integration effort to tie the kiln in to the rest of the process once it arrives on site. A lot of the work can be preprogrammed, but there will still need to be at the very least a checkout effort. I’m not familiar with what they are building, but I do have a lot of experience with others process control projects and I would guess they are still a few weeks away from having the pilot plant up and running, tested, optimized and documented.
Frustrated but waiting (somewhat) patiently,
Max
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