In many mills, kiln production limitations are the bottleneck to increasing caustic plant throughput. There are numerous ways to incrementally increase kiln capacity (chain, refractory design, mud solids improvement, dust recycle reduction, etc.) but to gain large increases in kiln production rate, the kiln internal volume as a whole has to be used more efficiently. The best way to do this is to eliminate the chain section in the kiln and move the drying of the mud external to the kiln by installing a flash dryer system. The Andritz LimeFlash~(tm) kiln flash dryer system has currently been installed in 14 mills on both new, greenfield kilns, as well as retrofits to existing pulp and paper kilns throughout the world. Earlier generations of flash-dryer technology have been installed on over 77 kilns since 1990. This paper reviews the theory and actual operating experiences from mills operating with a flash dryer system. Operating data from retrofits are presented. Typical project scope and required modification to the existing kilns are reviewed.
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