It is difficult to modify existing refractory plants to be fully automated for mass production when they receive customer's orders for small quantities of pieces with a variety of specifications. Plants manufacturing simple shapes, such as straight bricks (Japanese Industrial Standards) and arch bricks, are more easily automated because their orders are for a large quantity of pieces. There are actual examples where basic bricks are manufactured with integrated automatic production equipment, having a production capacity of 2,000 tons per month, i.e., high productivity and the capability to modify quality, based on a computer integrated manufacturing system network, with more than 20 robots, and some carts that operate unattended. Also, there is the need to automate manufacturing devices and to mechanize hand-work for saving energy and improving the working environment, with no change in the present layout. There are some papers that report the development of automated weighing and mixing devices, for uniformly dispersing small quantity additives and binders for unburned bricks, such as MgO-C brick. This paper discusses the mechanization and automation of a plant that manufactures basic bricks for the rotary cement kiln, from the forming process to the packing operation.
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