COPE Drive for the LOESCHE Vertical Roller Mills
LOESCHE is involved in the new construction of a large cement plant in Egypt with three vertical roller mills. The end customer is the Egyptian Cement for Cement Projects Management S.A.E. The planned new plant is located nearly 500 km south of Cairo in Sohag.
The LOESCHE scope of delivery includes a raw material mill with a capacity of 540 t/h of cement raw meal, a cement mill with an output of 350 t/h of clinker as well as a coal mill with an output of 45 t/h.
The cement mill for this order is equipped with the COPE drive (COmpact Planetary Electric Drive). The COPE drive concept was developed especially for powerful vertical roller mills with over 6 MW of power by LOESCHE together with the Renk company. Six or eight water-cooled cage rotor induction engines drive the grinding table of the mill through a planetary gear. The motor pinion can be engaged or disengaged.
The motors are also individually replaceable, which makes the COPE drive very maintenance-friendly. Moreover the mills can be further operated in case of a breakdown of one or several motors until the operation of a replacement is permissible. This results in a higher plant availability.
Last but not least, the energy efficiency convinced the general contractor as well as the end customer, that with the LOESCHE mills, cement of the highest quality could be produced.
The Chinese Chengdu Design & Research Institute (CDI) functions as the general contractor for the project and belongs to the renowned Sinoma Group, which is specialized in the planning and construction of cement plants. CDI has not only successfully worked together with LOESCHE in Egypt, but on many occasions worldwide, such as for the cement producer El Arish, the lines 3 & 4 as well as the Beni Suef Cement Plant, where before the end of 2017, six new production lines for cement clinker will be formed, each with a daily capacity of 6,000 tons, for which LOESCHE will soon provide 18 new vertical roller mills.