Crushing and Screening

The starting point is "the start".

For each machine (or at least those you believe will be able to be improved) monitor the output relative to the inputs and start to develop energy/product relationships for each machine.

Once you know where the energy and materials are going you can them monitor the effects of whatever actions you take.

You might like to investigate things like lubrication intervals, bearing renewals, and even motor condition (like dust and other material in the cooling path.) and even the response of the equipment to the amount of material inside the actual process at any point of time. (I imagine that an overfull ballmill would use heaps of power to run, but the action of the balls would be less effective and throughput would be reduced or of poor quality.)

As far as "new" developments, I don't know what your current technology is. Real time monitoring of energy (current draw) relative to motor speed and product yield are often very useful. You will know the parameters that are "sensitive" to your situation, getting sensors and then sensible respone to their output is the key.

Please also remember there may be outputs like exhaust gas concentrations and such that can also give good indications of how healthy the process is and at the same time satisfy external environmental requirements.

Acutually it has been my experience, in the electric power industry with ball mills that crush limestone for scrubbers, that power is wasted in a ball mill that has too few balls. The limestone has to make more trips through the mill to get to the right particle size. When loading balls you are looking to reach the peak power draw of the ball mill motor. There will be a ballance between this and the actual ball load. Our ball mills kick out an excess of balls. Once you establish what the Kw is for the max ball load, you reload balls with that target value. It is not a great percentage below full load where ineffiency increases dramatically.

Just minimize frequent start-ups by less frequent shut downs. These would imply, have a schedule of production by batch as possible continous. Also, as far as my experience, I've been to a plant like this somewhere in Cebu, Philippines, they use coconut shells to be converted to activated carbon, my observation is, most of the heat are just exhausted in the kiln stack (about 500 or 600 deg C). That's a pure wastage. If you have an idea of how to still utilize the exhaust heat(in process boliers), that would be best. Though, may be your plant is bit different than this.

Cheers!

I find that it's pretty hard to look at generic equipment descriptions and give real answers about energy efficiency and optimizing output. Each plant has unique factors, and you have to take a larger look to make sure that changes don't affect other pieces of equipment.

That being said, start with gathering data. At a minimum you need nameplate data. It's even better to put a power quality meter on each piece of equipment and log data for a week. This will tell you how much power it's actually using.

This is way beyond the scope of a casual thread. Contact me offline and we can discuss further.

Optimization, waste reduction, waste recycling, waste heat utilisation etc are the techniques for it.

Use a jet mill and classifier...