Vertical roller mills are not only used for grinding cement raw materials but also find an application in grinding a wide variety of coal types in cement and power plants. Gebr Pfeiffer SE (GPSE) describes its vertical roller mills for coal grinding and provides a case study of an MPS225BK installed at CBR’s Lixhe cement works in Belgium. By Dr Caroline Woywadt and Rüdiger Sonnen, Gebr Pfeiffer SE, Germany.
Customers from all over the world rely on Gebr Pfeiffer’s MPS and MVR vertical roller mill solutions for grinding cement raw material, clinker and granulated blast furnace slag. The MPS technology, however, is also applied in numerous installations simultaneously grinding and drying coal for use in cement plants, power stations and in the steel industry. In these plants very different coal types like anthracite, bituminous coal or lignite and also various kinds of petcoke are processed. Two mill systems are employed for most coal grinding applications in the cement industry. These are, on the one hand, vertical roller mills that have achieved a share of almost 90 per cent and, on the other, ball mills whose share is recorded at just over 10 per cent1.