Lehigh Southwest Cement Plant performs annual refurbishment
Lehigh Southwest Cement Plant performs annual refurbishment
By: Matthew Chew
Topics: lehigh, cement
Posted by editor Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
Viewed 355 times
0 responses 0 comments The gatekeeper to the east of Tehachapi, Lehigh Southwest Cement Plant, completed its annual check-up and refurbishment on April 10, known as an “outage process.”
“The refurbishment of the whole cement plant is to make it reliable for the complete upcoming year of production,” said plant manager Axel Conrads.
Conrads said the supply chain is not interrupted during the operation, and that this year’s outage lasted two and a half weeks. The plant builds up a surplus of cement products prior to beginning the preventative operation so it can maintain its supply chain.
Jim Simmons, Lehigh Assistant to Management for Public Affairs said, “This year was much more standard maintenance — cleaning, fixing, tightening, and some new equipment, but no major pieces of machinery were replaced.”
He gave a general overview of the normal progression of raw material to cement.
Pieces of rock ride from the quarry on a conveyor system, which is over two miles long, to a point where it is scanned with gamma rays to determine its constituency.
It then travels into the large dome, visible from much of Tehachapi, where crushing and homogenization of the material by size occurs. Materials must be dust-like before passing into the next phase.
The material passes through a preheating area and into the kiln, where temperatures reach 2,800 degrees fahrenheit.
The once-quarried rock now resembles volcanic material known as “klinker,” as it moves to another crushing device, where it becomes cement dust.
All facets of the operation are examined during the outage.
The approximately 120 regular Lehigh employees take part in the outage and between 120 and 200 other Lehigh personnel are brought in to assist with the time-sensitive operation.
“We more or less doubled our workforce,” said Conrads.
He said the people of Tehachapi were not affected by the outage, other than the temporary increase in population.
“They probably noticed, because they didn’t have any hotel rooms,” Conrads said, adding, “They also might have noticed the increase in local sales.”
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