As part of the cooler conversion at its Ste Genevieve cement plant, USA, LafargeHolcim opted for a modular precast cooler curb system to help reduce downtime during the project. This enabled the cement producer to light up only 48 days after shutdown. By Gilles Mercier, Wahl Refractory Solutions LLC, USA.
LafargeHolcim’s Ste Genevieve plant in Missouri, USA, was commissioned in 2009 as the largest single-kiln line cement plant in the world with a cement capacity of 4Mta. In 2016 LafargeHolcim made the decision to replace its clinker cooler to an IKN Pendulum Cooler to improve the reliability of its clinker cooling (see Figure 1).
The decision was made to perform the entire cooler modification over a kiln outage of 50 days flame-to-flame. To reach this ambitious target, all factors that would contribute to a quick installation had to be foreseen during the engineering and execution of the project.
