Industry: Pulp & Paper
Service Area: Project Mechanical/Reliability Engineering
Location: Midwest United States

Challenge

Modern Lime Kilns are extremely expensive and important pieces of equipment in many manufacturing industries. Maintaining them is very costly and requires a lot of resources coordination leading up to and during an annual outage. Many maintenance departments do not have a person that can effectively manage all of this and all the other things they are required to do.

One of our clients asked Pillar Engineering to assist the planning and execution of this work. One of our engineers managed this work at another mill for many year, so they could jump right in.

Objective

• Lay out a long-term cost-effective strategy for maintaining the kiln by working with the client’s operations and maintenance groups. When that strategy is agreed upon, execute that plan.

Solution

The Pillar Engineering engineer worked with the mill to execute the outage that first year. Request For Quotes (RFQs) were developed for the refractory, mechanical, NDE, and any other special work that needed to be done. These were developed from the mill’s standard templates. After reviewing these quotes with the mill’s operations, maintenance, and purchasing departments, the Pillar engineer used the mill’s CMMS system to order all the parts and services. During the next several months, they developed a detailed outage plan. Upon completion, the Pillar engineer worked with contractors, operations group, and maintenance to lay out a long term to plan to stay on top of the items that needed to be maintained or fixed in a cost-effective manner.

Results

• During the outage, the Pillar engineer acted as the mill’s representative to execute a safe, well executed, and on-budget outage.

• Upon completion, the Pillar engineer worked with the contractors, operations group, and maintenance to lay out a long-term plan to stay on top of the items that needed to be maintained or fixed in a cost-effective manner.

• The Pillar engineer developed a tool to track the refractory wear rate in each section of the kiln to be able to predict when brick would nee to be replaced.