Gebr. Pfeiffer SE will supply Australia’s largest vertical roller mill for cement grinding to Australia’s leading cement manufacturer Cement Australia Pty. Ltd. whose main shareholders are Holcim Ltd and HeidelbergCement AG.

The overall project will be carried out in co-operation with the Spanish EPC leader Cemengal S.A.

The suppliers of the plant were faced with the task of meeting the customer’s high demands and responding to the country specific requirements. This challenge is reflected in the need for the suppliers to meet short delivery times demanded by the customer, to transport the plant parts in preassembled condition, to install parts weighing far more than 100t, and to make critical spare parts available from Europe at short notice in order to ensure continuous operation and the planned production.

In view of the above constraints Cement Australia made the decision to opt for a Pfeiffer vertical roller mill of the type MVR 6000 C-6 coupled with a MultiDrive® system, which will come equipped with three drive modules with a total installed power of 5520kW. The main feature of this mill is the active redundancy of its six grinding rollers and its three drive modules. The new drive system developed by Gebr. Pfeiffer together with Siemens-Flender perfectly completes the mill concept. It allows the mill to continue in operation when one drive module or one grinding roller is under maintenance. Thanks to this concept the availability of the mill is improved even further and exceeds the availability of a two-mill solution.

The mill is intended to alternately grind 208tph of CEM I (consisting of 90 per cent of clinker, five per cent of limestone and five per cent of gypsum) and 190tph of granulated blast-furnace slag (containing 95 per cent of slag and five per cent of gypsum). The required annual capacity will be 1.1Mt of cement and granulated blast-furnace slag. Mechanical reserves to meet future increasing market demands have also been considered when designing the plant.

Production is scheduled to begin in 2013.