This month Arthur Harrisson looks at the relationship between temperature differences in the clinker manufacturing process, the composition of clinker produced and the quality of the final cement.
In a project to explore the influence of different temperature profiles on clinker characteristics, a range of commonly available measurements relating to the clinker manufacturing process were matched with analysis of the clinker minerals.
The clinker characteristics were derived from a study of 20 clinker samples for which the composition of each of the clinker phases – alite, belite, aluminate and ferrite – were obtained using scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray microanalysis.
