Cement Plant Automation: ABB Robots in the Quality Lab

Cement plant automation from hand sampling at the kiln to pneumatic tubes and robotic labs, and where ABB robots and Expert Optimizer fit in the years ahead.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/4/20265 min read

A cement kiln runs around the clock, and the lab next to it decides whether the clinker coming out is any good. For most of the industry's history that meant someone walking out with a scoop, carrying a hot sample back, grinding it and testing it by hand. This post follows cement plant automation through that lab, from hand sampling to pneumatic tubes and X-ray analysers, and on to the robot cells that now prepare samples without anyone touching them. Along the way it looks at where ABB robots and ABB's process control software fit, and at the parts that are still hard to automate.

Tall steel preheater tower and silos of a cement plant under a blue sky with clouds

The kiln tower of the cement plant in Union Bridge, Maryland, 2013. Photo: Acroterion / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From scoops and test tubes to rotary kilns

Early Portland cement works checked their product by hand. Chemists worked out the lime, silica and alumina in the raw mix and in the clinker with wet chemistry, and kiln burners adjusted the fire by eye and experience. Thomas Edison's cement plant at Stewartsville, New Jersey, around 1900, gives a sense of how much of the job depended on people. Staff from his own laboratory built the giant crushing rolls for its mill, and every later stage of the process still had workers watching it, taking samples and making adjustments.

Black and white group photo of dozens of workmen posed in rows in front of a brick building

Laboratory staff who built the giant crushing rolls for Edison's cement plant at Stewartsville, around 1900. Photo: Thomas Edison National Historical Park via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The rotary kiln raised the stakes. Trials began around 1885, and the first successful rotary kilns ran in Pennsylvania around 1890, based on a design by Frederick Ransome. A rotary kiln never stops, so the lab had to keep up with a continuous stream of material. One number became central: free lime, the calcium oxide left unreacted in the clinker. Plants measured it regularly to judge how well the kiln was burning, and between results the operators adjusted fuel and feed from experience.

Old printed photo of a long cylindrical rotary kiln lying on supports inside a factory hall

An Allis-Chalmers rotary cement kiln, pictured in the journal Cement Age in December 1910. Photo: Cement Age via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Plants first tried computer control of kilns in the early 1960s. The early results were poor, mainly because the process measurements feeding the computers were weak. Better measurement came from the lab. Fuller Technologies, formerly FLSmidth Cement, says its QCX systems have prepared powder samples for X-ray analysis automatically since 1978. Pneumatic tube networks began carrying sample capsules from the kiln, mills and cooler straight into the lab, so nobody had to walk them across the plant through the dust and heat.

Boxy beige X-ray spectrometer cabinet with a sample conveyor standing in a plant laboratory

An X-ray fluorescence spectrometer in the automated laboratory of a cement plant, 2007. Photo: LinguisticDemographer / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robot cells, pneumatic tubes and ABB software today

Walk into a modern cement lab and the centre of the room is often a robot. In thyssenkrupp Polysius's POLAB AMT, an industrial robot stands inside a ring of grinders, tablet presses and analysers, and samples arrive by pneumatic tube in 350 cubic centimetre capsules. Polysius says the sample handling in the AMT is done by an ABB industrial robot. At Wonder Cement's plant in Nimbahera, Rajasthan, a POLAB AMT lab checks raw mill, kiln feed, clinker and cement samples, and one analysis takes about 18 minutes. Wonder Cement's write up puts a typical lab project at 10 to 20 samples and says one robot cell can reach 240 samples a day.

Large red rotary kiln tube running past steel structures and pipes at a modern cement plant

The rotary kiln of the Gorazdze cement plant in Poland, 2006. Photo: Jb957 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The lab results feed control software, which is where ABB's latest cement news comes from. In September 2026 Tokuyama reported that seven mills at its Nanyo plant in Japan ran at better than 90 percent automatic operation with ABB Ability Expert Optimizer, with grinding throughput up 3 percent and specific power use down 3 percent. In July, Nippon Steel's Muroran cement plant reported 2.2 percent lower heat consumption, about 10 percent less free lime and roughly 80 percent fewer manual operator interventions after putting the same software on its kiln.

Two men in front of a wall of screens showing process charts in a bright control room

Operators in an ABB control room for the Expert Optimizer advanced process control software. Photo: ABB

ABB's arms already do the sort of handling a cement lab needs. The IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection is built to cope with water and dust, which matters next to grinders and presses. The GoFa CRB 15000 cobot works in automated labs in other industries, including the workstations XtalPi built with GoFa arms. Engineers usually lay out and test cells like these first in RobotStudio, so they can check that the arm reaches every press and analyser before any hardware arrives. ABB's SafeMove software can also fence off zones in the cell, so a technician can clean a press while the arm keeps away from that corner.

White ABB robot arm marked Foundry Plus 2 holding a gripper inside a glass enclosed cell

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

Where cement labs and plant robots go next

The next step is a lab that needs very few people on site. Fuller's own brochure spells out the pressure: plants run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, new plants are often built where skilled lab staff are hard to recruit, and support increasingly comes from a distance. Polysius already sells POLAB Shuttle, in which a mobile robot carries samples between stations in place of a fixed conveyor. That flexible layout is close to what robot run research labs use in chemistry and drug discovery.

Close view of a white ABB GoFa cobot arm placing a sample holder into lab equipment

An ABB GoFa cobot working with lab instruments at the SLAS lab automation conference. Photo: ABB

The other direction is a tighter loop between the lab and the kiln. The Muroran figures show what happens when software reacts to free lime and temperature faster than an operator can, and a robot lab that delivers XRF results every few minutes gives that software better input. ABB could in principle supply both ends, robots in the lab and Expert Optimizer in the control room. In practice, plant owners usually buy lab automation as a package from cement specialists such as Polysius or Fuller.

White ABB GoFa robot arm with a gripper on a wooden table next to small boxes

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

The remaining problems are practical ones. Cement dust wears out grippers, mills and seals, so every cell needs maintenance staff who understand robots as well as chemistry. The investment is large for a small plant, and an older plant may have no tube network to feed a robot lab at all. Hot samples and robots working near people also bring safety rules that a cell design has to respect. If you want to see how other plants have put ABB arms to work, our list of ABB robot use cases is a good next stop.

Grey porous lumps of cement clinker piled in a metal coal scuttle on a counter

Lumps of clinker from a Superior Portland Cement Company kiln, at the Concrete Heritage Museum. Photo: 凰兰时罗 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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