Gas cleaning in the cement industry is an enormous task. The modern process of cement
production involves crushing and grinding of carbonaceous and clayey raw materials under
dry conditions, thermal processing of finely ground raw meal, i.e. preheating, precalcining
and sintering in rotary kiln, cooling of the clinker (sintered material) on a reciprocating
grate cooler and further grinding and packaging of the product cement. Besides this, a great
amount of mechanical conveying is also involved. All these operations generate a huge
quantity of gas and particulates of varying characteristics, such as temperature, moisture
content, particle size distribution, chemical composition, abrassiveness, etc. The selection of
gas cleaning equipment depends upon these characteristics. The commonly used equipment
are settling chambers, conventional and high efficiency cyclones/multi-cyclones, fabric
filters (FF) and electrostatic precipitators (ESP). As can be seen in Table 1, FF and ESP are
the most commonly used equipment. In this paper, some aspects related to the application
of ESP are discussed.