World's largest white cement plant F.L. Smidth landed a contract to supply machinery and equipment to a new 1,500-mtpd white cement line in Turkey, which the company claims will be the world's biggest white cement line to date.

The customer is Turkey's second-largest private group, Sabanci Holding, involved in car making, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, banking, and cement production. It is one of the biggest players on the Turkish cement market with interests in five cement plants.

The new line will be a separate unit of the CIMSA plant, Mersin, which has excellent shipping facilities for cement distribution to the group's own terminals in the Mediterranean region among others, which is a very important market for white cement.

The CIMSA plant already operates grey and white cement production lines, and F.L. Smidth is right now putting the finishing touches to an upgrade of the existing white cement line, which will boost its output to 1,400 mtpd.

FLS supplies for the new line include circular raw material stores, a raw meal silo, a kiln with preheater and calciner, a rotary cooler, a clinker silo, and a cement mill with Symetro gear. Also included are two electrostatic precipitators from FLS Milj degrees and a complete control system from FLS Automation, with both companies acting as subcontractors to F.L. Smith. Ventomatic, another FFE Group company, will supply a complete packaging plant.

Jura orders up control In Wildegg, Switzerland, the Jura Cement Works upgraded its existing Procontic information management system, supplied by ABB (then Brown Boveri) with ABB's Cement Information Management System (CIMS).

The order included all related hardware, software, and engineering. The installation is the first to run in a Windows NT 4.0 server environment. The server interfaces with Windows 3.1 on the client side. The Jura operation has particularly complex information management demands and requires an unusual level of process control due to the wide variety of cement types produced.

In America, at Blue Circle Cement's 72-silo operation in Atlanta, Georgia, a comprehensive information management revamp with CIMS will interface with the existing MICON process control environment and ABB's Linkman, installed in 1997 for kiln control. Blue Circle requires complex quality tracking protocols. The project was engineered, supplied, and put into operation with ABB Industrial System, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Blue Circle reaping rewards "The benefits of the business process review [in the UK cement division] are starting to materialize, and the business is continuing to concentrate on investments that are required for future growth," said Blue Circle's chief executive, Keith Orrell-Jones, writing in the company's latest annual report.

Orrell-Jones highlighted strong performance in the United States boosted by the addition of Canadian-based St Marys, to the group, which he hinted would lead to changes in the entire North American organization in an attempt to improve overall effectiveness.

The chief executive went on to say that despite difficult times in areas of the world such as Malaysia and Chile, due to slow down in cement demand, the international nature of the company ensured that the high flyers helped balance the low performers.

The report claims that the challenge to the group is to diversify geographically and aim to minimize risks while continuing to look for opportunities to grow the business in heavy building materials operations in Europe, the Far East and in North and South America. Orrell-Jones also suggested that new geographical markets, such as India, were being considered, particularly through the use of joint ventures.