The use of calcined clays as supplementary cementitious materials provides the opportunity to significantly reduce the cement industry’s carbon burden; however, use at a global scale requires a deep understanding of the extraction and processing of the clays to be used, which will uncover routes to optimise their reactivity. This will enable increased usage of calcined clays as cement replacements, further improving the sustainability of concretes produced with them. Existing technologies can be adopted to produce calcined clays at an industrial scale in many regions around the world. This paper, produced by RILEM TC 282-CCL on calcined clays as supplementary cementitious materials (working group 2), focuses on the production of calcined clays, presents an overview of clay mining, and assesses the current state of the art in clay calcination technology, covering the most relevant aspects from the clay deposit to the factory gate. The energetics and associated carbon footprint of the calcination process are also discussed, and an outlook on clay calcination is presented, discussing the technological advancements required to fulfil future global demand for this material in sustainable infrastructure development.

This paper presents the results of an industrial trial for the production of calcined clay to be used as pozzolan in cement manufacture. For the trial, a wet-process clinker rotary kiln was modified to process on dry basis the low grade kaolinitic clay used as raw material. The kaolinitic clay deposit was chosen through a screening based on geologic, chemical and mineralogical criteria, and a confirmation of reactivity with an experimental protocol at lab scale. During the calcination trial technological parameters such as rotation speed, fuel pressure and outer temperature of calcined clay were measured and coupled with the reactivity of the samples tested, thus, preliminary estimations of operational parameters can be made. The trial proved that it is possible to produce a reactive pozzolan at industrial scale by implementing small conversions on existing equipment of a typical clinker plant