As the core equipment of cement firing system, the performance of cement rotary kiln burner has an important impact on cement production efficiency and quality. However, due to the difficulty of comprehensively measuring the high-temperature and complex reaction process in the rotary kiln, the evaluation of burner performance often relies on experience and lacks theoretical guidance. To this end, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to simulate the combustion process of pulverized coal to optimize the burner of cement rotary kiln. The optimization simulation results show that with the increase of axial wind velocity within a reasonable range, the gas phase temperature increases significantly, the high temperature region expands, the oxygen consumption rate increases, the mass fraction of carbon monoxide decreases, and the combustion efficiency is improved. The increase of swirl flow wind velocity has little effect on the temperature field, but it can significantly improve the mixing effect of pulverized coal and air and promote combustion. On this basis, the performance of the burner is optimized by increasing the axial flow wind velocity and swirl flow wind velocity, which improves the temperature field and component field distribution in the kiln, and affects the clinker mineral composition, in which the content of C3S and C4AF increase, and the content of C2S and C3A decrease, which has a positive impact on the performance of cement. In conclusion, the effects of axial flow wind velocity and swirl flow wind velocity on the performance of cement rotary kiln burner are deeply analyzed by numerical simulation method, which provides theoretical support for the optimal design of the burner, and the proposed burner optimization scheme effectively improves the distribution of temperature field and species field in the kiln, and improve the combustion efficiency and clinker quality of the fuel.