Engineering and design of the Pyro metallurgical plant, Three kids mine, Henderson, Nevada

Abstract

This thesis is a description of an effort to adapt rotary kilns to a new process. The rotary kiln is the largest piece of moving equipment available to industry. All the intricacies of its mechanical operation are known, but adapting the rotary kiln to a new process poses many problems. It is difficult to interpolate data from other processes using rotary kilns and the basic technology has not advanced to the state where one can use a set of standard formulas. The first section covers laboratory and pilot plant work, with the conclusions drawn from this work. The next section deals with the theoretical concepts of heat transfer and illustrates typical examples of the type of process calculations that were made during the months of plant design. Considerable effort was expended in an attempt to correlate the work of others so it would be applicable to our problem. The final section contains drawings and some calculations, which, in general, deal with the mechanical aspects of kiln design.