Preheater Building

The preheater building at Kandos Cement Works rises above the kiln line, a tall steel-framed tower with a stack of cyclonic separators inside and a single concrete stack venting at the top. The cladding is corrugated steel, weathered to a dark grey. The tower is rectangular in plan, with access stairs zig-zagging up the outside on one face and a goods hoist on another. Catwalks and instrument lines run between the storeys. The whole structure is taller than anything around it on the southern side of the plant. From a distance, the preheater is the most identifiable Kandos silhouette against the sandstone hills behind. Close up, the steelwork carries a fine pale grey crust of cement dust.

The preheater is the upper section of a modern dry-process cement kiln. Raw meal cascades down through a stack of cyclonic separators while hot kiln exhaust gas rises through them, transferring heat into the meal so that it enters the kiln at close to calcination temperature. The system is a major energy-saver compared to the older wet-process and long-kiln designs. Kandos ran a preheater of this kind in its later operational decades, and Cement Australia invested $10 million in modernisation in 2007, including a new Kiln 6 stack. The works closed four years later, in September 2011, after 95 years of cement production. The preheater is one of the structures most likely to remain in place at the site for years to come.