Brick Manufacturing: From Ring Kilns to ABB Robots

How brick manufacturing moved from hand moulding and the 1858 Hoffmann kiln to extruders, tunnel kilns and robots that set and pack bricks, like ABB IRB 660.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/8/20265 min read

Brick manufacturing means moving a lot of heavy material through heat and dust. A plant shapes clay into green bricks, dries them, fires them for days and packs them for building sites, and at almost every step someone used to lift the bricks by hand. This post follows how that changed, from hand moulding and the Hoffmann ring kiln to extruders, tunnel kilns and robots that set green bricks on kiln cars and pack the fired ones. We look at this year's news from brick plants, at ABB IRB 660 and IRB 460 palletizers, and at what is still hard to automate. Laying bricks on site is a separate story, covered in our bricklaying post.

Long covered hall beside a brick kiln wall with arched openings and rails running along the floor

Rails run along the tunnel kiln hall of the former Tangrong brick kiln in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Photo: Mk2010 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How bricks were moulded and fired by hand

For most of history, bricks were moulded by hand. A moulder threw a lump of wet clay into a wooden mould, struck off the excess and turned the brick out onto the ground to dry before it went into a kiln. Machines took over from hand moulding in the first half of the 19th century. Richard A. Ver Valen of Haverstraw, New York, patented the first brick making machine in 1852, and by 1855 a machine built by Henry Clayton could turn out up to 25,000 bricks a day with little supervision.

Black and white photo of women in work clothes pushing a heavy cart of clay inside a brickworks

Women trucking clay to the moulding house for silica brick making in South Wales during the First World War. Photo: George P. Lewis / Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Firing changed in 1858, when the German Friedrich Hoffmann patented his ring kiln. It is a loop of chambers around a main fire passage. The fire moves from one chamber to the next, and the hot gases from the chamber being fired go on to dry and preheat the bricks waiting further along, which makes the kiln very fuel efficient. Each chamber has an outside door for loading wet bricks and taking fired ones out. Hoffmann kilns are still used in places where labour is cheap.

Long brick kiln with arched openings under a metal roof next to a tall square brick chimney

The Hoffmann kiln at Llanymynech, one of the few in Britain that still has its chimney. Photo: David Smith / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Most large plants now use a different layout. Clay is forced through a die as a long column and cut into bricks by a wall of wires. The green bricks are then stacked on kiln cars that travel slowly through a tunnel kiln. Stacking those cars is called setting, and taking the fired bricks off again is called dehacking. Each means moving thousands of bricks a shift, and in modern plants setting machines and robots often do both.

Black and white photo of a large clay extrusion machine with pipes and a platform in a plant

The main extrusion machine at the D'Hanis Brick Works in Texas, recorded for the Historic American Engineering Record. Photo: Jet Lowe, HAER via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Brick manufacturing plants and ABB robots today

Two stories from the past few weeks show the pressure on brick makers. In August OSHA proposed penalties of $496,528 against General Shale, trading as Watsontown Brick, after an inspection found workers in a Pennsylvania plant that makes moulded brick exposed to silica dust above safe limits. In Western Australia, where Midland Brick has put customers on allocation, the state agreed in September to pay up to $4 million to restart the Cardup brickworks, mothballed since 2023, with new bricks expected in 2027. Short supply and dusty work are both arguments for automating the heavy steps.

Round domed brick kiln with an arched door partly covered by plants and a flywheel beside it

Kiln 3A at Jenkins Brick Company's Plant No. 2 in Montgomery, Alabama, fully loaded. Photo: Jet Lowe, HAER via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Quality checks are moving onto the line too. At the 72nd Clemson Brick Plant Operator's Forum in Anderson, South Carolina, on 28 and 29 September, senswork presented BrickChecker. It scans each brick with two 3D laser sensors and reports dimensions, flatness, parallelism and squareness to within 0.1 mm while the line keeps running, and it can send the data to the plant's PLC or MES. With that data, a robot that sets or packs bricks can pull out the ones that fail before they reach a pallet.

Orange ABB four axis robot with a large layer gripper above roller conveyors in a factory

An ABB four axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

ABB robots already do this kind of work. In 2012 ABB supplied four IRB 660 palletizing robots to the Datong Coal Mine Group for a brick line at its Tashan mine in China, which turns waste rock from coal mining into bricks. Working with machinery from Shandong GONGLI, the robots stack the unfired bricks and place them in the kiln, a job workers used to do by hand. The IRB 660 is a four axis robot with a 3.15 m reach and up to 250 kg payload. The smaller IRB 460 handles up to 110 kg, a good size for packing finished bricks onto pallets.

White ABB palletizing robot stacking brown cartons onto a pallet beside red boxes

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking loads onto pallets at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Where brick plants and their robots go next

Most new robot work in brick plants will happen at the two ends of the kiln. Setting green bricks calls for a gentle gripper, because unfired clay dents and cracks easily. Dehacking and packing fired bricks calls for speed and strength. A plant with a robot at each end and an inline 3D check like BrickChecker could switch brick formats mostly in software. Stacking patterns and gripper moves are easier to try out in RobotStudio than on a running kiln car line.

ABB robot arm with a gripper above rows of unfired pale clay flagons on a line

An ABB robot places clay flagons before their first firing at Wade Ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photo: ABB

Homeowners feel this through supply. When a region runs short of bricks, as Western Australia has, house builds wait, and a reopened plant still needs people to run it. Robots that take over the heaviest and dustiest steps could help a brickworks restart or grow without hiring as many people for those jobs. They could also keep workers away from the kind of silica exposure OSHA cited in Pennsylvania, although dust still has to be controlled at the source.

High view of a factory hall with several robot cells stacking wrapped packs onto pallets

ABB palletizing robots on the production lines of Piracanjuba's plant in Goiás, Brazil. Photo: ABB (ABB Robotics magazine 1/14)

Several problems remain. Many brick plants run old kilns and conveyors, and adding robots means new controls, safety fencing and a gripper for each brick format. Robots near a kiln need protection from heat and abrasive dust, and maintenance staff need training to keep them running. The IRB 660 is built for harsh plants and rated IP67, yet in many older brickworks the case for robots still has to beat low labour costs, the same condition that keeps Hoffmann kilns in use.

Tall concrete chimney rising over low walls of stacked red bricks with a worker and a truck

A brick kiln chimney at a brickyard in Punjab, where bricks are still stacked by hand. Photo: Zenit / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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