Howden’s successful retrofit in South America

Early in 2020, Howden responded to a call from a cement plant in Brazil to retrofit a fan for reduced energy consumption. This retrofit project would involve replacing the rotor, shaft and input cone of the preheater kiln exhaust fan. 

The retrofit had not been allocated as a capex project. In addition, to coincide with a planned shutdown, delivery would be needed within just 35 days, in time for the installation of the kiln outage. The equipment weighed 22t with a rotor diameter of 3870mm.

Howden was able to respond to the challenge and this cement plant became one of Howden’s first customers to take full advantage of its project financing option. To track the equipment's performance, a remote monitoring panel, developed by Howden, was installed to allow the remote analysis of the ventilator's operating parameters, including energy consumption.

The project resulted in an overall reduction of 644kW/h in energy consumption, which will provide savings of around BRl1.48m (US$260,000) per year for the customer. The ROI will be realised in approximately three years.