Education is the key to know-how, innovation and productivity as well as safety. Alpha Thermal principal AA Boateng is a world-renowned authority on rotary kilns. Dubbed ‘the kiln doctor’ he has conducted most research, designed, commissioned and operated rotary kilns of all types and considered perhaps one of the most experienced on the device. He and his key associates have over 100 years collective experience that they bring to bear in providing clients with the right advice when it comes to your rotary kiln needs.
AlphaThermal brings these experiences to you in several ways including educational training courses, seminars and lectures to suit your educational needs. Courses are either taught at your site and tailored to your specific needs or you may join in with others in public training courses which we periodically announce. One advantage of the latter is the facilitation of discussions with participants with problems different than your own resulting in shared experience.
In the past, AlphaThermal has teamed up with partners such as Industrial Kilns & Dryers (IKD) in offering such training in public venues through the IKD University curriculum.
As an example of our educational capabilities did you know how rotary kilns evolved? You can get this simple but important information from Alpha Thermal Principal whose book was excerpted and re-published by Elsevier Science Direct as follows:
The Rotary Kiln Evolution
Rotary kilns have been synonymous with cement and lime kilns probably because of the history of their evolution and development. It has been reported that cement deposits characterized by Israeli geologists in the 1960s and the 1970s place cement making at 12,000,000 BC when reactions between limestone and oil shale occurred during spontaneous combustion to form a natural deposit of cement compounds (Blezard, 1998). Between 3000 and 300 BC, cement evolution had continued with the Egyptians who used mud mixed with straw to bind dried bricks to carry out massive projects such as the pyramids. This evolution continued with the Chinese who used cementitious materials for building the Great Wall. Projects such as the building of the Appian Way by the Romans later led to the use of pozzolana cement from Pozzuoli, Italy, near Mt Vesuvius. However, it is reported that the technology that uses the burning of lime and pozzolana to form a cementitious admixture was lost and was only reintroduced in the 1300’s. In the United States, projects such as the construction of a system of canals in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly the Erie Canal in 1818, created the first large-scale demand for cement in this country, which led to various cement production businesses to compete for the market share. By 1824, Portland cement had been invented and developed by Joseph Aspdin of England; this involved the burning of finely ground chalk with finely divided clay in a lime kiln yielding carbon dioxide as an off-gas (Peray, 1986). In these early days, stationary kilns were used and it is said that the sintered product was wastefully allowed to cool after each burning before grinding. The history of cement (Blezard, 1998) has it that in the late 1870s Thomas Millen and his two sons, while experimenting with the manufacture of Portland cement in South Bend, Indiana, burned their first Portland cement in a piece of sewer pipe. This perhaps marked the first experimental rotary kiln use in America. By 1885, an English engineer, F. Ransome, had patented a slightly tilted horizontal kiln that could be rotated so that material could move gradually from one end to the other. The underlying principle of this invention constitutes the rotary kiln transport phenomenon that we know of today.
From – A. A Boateng, in Rotary Kilns (Second Edition), 2016 https://www.elsevier.com/books/T/A/9780128037805