Robotic sampling
Autonomous clinker and cement sampling that feeds Clinvue directly.
Physical layer · Clinkum ecosystem
Refron
Robots that sample, scan, and inspect the kiln, so people don't have to.
- Manual work
- removed
- Inspection
- continuous
- Safety
- hands-off
The problem
Why Refron exists.
Cement plants are hot, dusty, and dangerous. Sampling is manual and infrequent, and inspecting the kiln shell and refractory usually means a shutdown or risky access. So rings, coating loss, and hot spots get caught late, after an unplanned stoppage. Packing and palletizing are heavy, injury-prone work.
What it does
How it works.
Refron is the physical-AI layer. It runs robotic clinker and cement sampling, drone and robot thermal scanning of the kiln shell and refractory, and packing and palletizing. Hot spots, shell deformation, and coating loss are caught continuously, samples flow straight to Clinvue, and every routine is trained and validated in simulation before it runs in the field.
What Refron does on the line.
Six capabilities, all sharing Clinkum's plant-edge platform, cement models, and audit trail.
Kiln scanning
Drone and robot thermal scans of the shell and refractory.
Defect detection
Rings, coating loss, hot spots, and shell deformation caught early.
Packing and palletizing
Robotic handling with defect and exception routines.
Sim to real
Routines trained and validated in Cemtwin and Isaac Sim first.
Safe by design
Operator handoff, geofencing, and an immutable action log.
Where it fits
One product in a closed loop.
Refron is the physical layer that keeps the loop fed and the plant running. It supplies samples and inspection data to Clinvue and protects the uptime Pyron depends on.
Runs on: Jetson Orin/Thor on the robots, IGX and Holoscan for inspection, DGX for skill training.
Built for
Who uses it.
Maintenance and reliability, safety (EHS), and operations teams at integrated plants, and groups standardizing inspection across sites.
See the platformPut Refron on a kiln.
Start with one line, prove the ROI in a quarter, then expand across the fleet.