Another R100-million investment in the FLSmidth Supercenter in Delmas, Mpumalanga, has set the South African facility up as the Group’s global centre of excellence for the manufacture and supply of vibrating equipment including dewatering screens and associated wear components and spares. MechChem Africa visited the facility and talks to Warren Walker, the Supercenter’s operations manager and Stephan Kruger, director of manufacturing and warehousing.
Click to download and read pdf
FLSmidth is a leading global company focused on original design, manufacture, marketing and supply of equipment, products, services and solutions for the mining and cement industries. “Here in South Africa, we have three centres of excellence, each with its own specialisation: Krebs pumps, cyclones and valves, which operates out of our Stormill site in Roodepoort; FLSmidth Emalahleni, which specialises in underground feeders, apron feeders, mineral sizers and reclaim feeders; and the Supercenter in Delmas, which is our global centre of excellence in manufacturing, refurbishing and upgrading of vibrating equipment, screens and associated wear parts and spares,” begins Kruger.
Underpinning the importance of FLSmidth’s Delmas Supercenter to the company’s global parent, a further R100 million has been invested in the facility, underscoring the Group’s positive attitude to the future of mining in South Africa and the surrounding region. “It is still possible to invest in South Africa and to emerge successful,” Kruger says.
Originally inaugurated in April 2013 with about half the space currently available, Kruger says the facility has been a “fantastic development” with excellent sector support from mining and cement customers. “From this facility, we have manufactured some massive pieces of equipment: We manufactured one of the biggest (50 t) horizontal deck screens ever produced by FLSmidth and, in order to service these, we found we needed an expanded capability.
“South Africa’s heavy manufacturing sector has been shrinking rapidly in recent years so we thought it essential to establish our own capability. We needed larger capacity with new technologies to enable us to manufacture bigger and better products in more efficient ways,” he explains.
Completed in April 2019, the expanded Supercenter is already at full capacity. “Our economic cycle is perhaps a year or so behind the global market, but the timing of this investment, we believe, has been ideal. Within six months of finalising the expansion, we are already at full capacity and running double shifts. Almost every section of this factory is fully productive and we find ourselves positioned to compete more successfully in local and international markets,” Kruger tells MechChem Africa.
At the starting point of the investment is a doubling of the workshop area and the installation of a 120 t lifting capacity with 11.5 m under hook. “This takes us into heavy fabrication, which puts us among only a handful of local fabricators with this capability,” says Walker. “The FLSmidth vibrating screen range now includes proprietary screen media decks, which we took on following the Ludowici acquisition in 2012. To enable us to repair and refurbish FLSmidth screens, we have extended the workshop by 40 m and dropped the floor level to get the necessary crane height. We have also added a dedicated test facility for our vibrating equipment,” he says.
“Our philosophy is service driven and we strive to maintain the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO). FLSmidth vibrating equipment is typically 30 to 40% heavier than industry standard screens and designed for a minimum life of 10 years. For structural integrity, they are built in strict accordance with the Australian AS 1554 Part 5 welding standard for vibrating equipment. These machines are subjected to a very high number of fatigue cycles and normal fatigue life will be exceeded within weeks. Close attention to the weld quality and the shape of the finished welds is necessary to eliminate the risk of premature failure,” Walker tells MechChem Africa.
“Because the premium screens are 30% heavier, the cost is on the higher side, so it becomes more difficult to grow the market share. A significant percentage of the investment has therefore gone into advanced manufacturing and machining equipment to raise productivity and minimise costs. We have installed various CNC machines and customised production lines to drive costs down,” he says.
“FLSmidth’s Ludodeck uses the ‘Rolls Royce’ of screen panels, a 2.0×1.0 m polyurethane panel that is manufactured with a clip rail system to make it the easiest on the market to install and maintain,” Walker suggests.
Turning attention to the manufacture of polyurethane screen panels, Kruger notes that this is a very cost competitive market. “These are consumable wear items so people look for the lowest cost option. This is particularly acute in the mid-tier mining sector which doesn’t have large global backers underwriting its investments.
“We have taken our polyurethane product line and modernised it to make it sufficiently cost effective that we can service all sectors of the market. We believe that the mid-tier mining sector has been neglected in the past, and this investment will go a long way in rectifying that,” he predicts.
The number of mining licenses being awarded to mid-tier mining companies is changing the industry in South Africa and North of our borders. “As an OEM, we are determined to create the infrastructure to better service this sector,” Kruger adds.
Walker continues: “Polyurethane panels are high volume wear parts that need to be identical to each other. Each panel has a welded steel frame that is covered with polyurethane. It used to take a skilled welder about five minutes to weld the frame and a further three minutes for loading and unloading the jig. We have now installed a robot welding cell that can produce these frames in 30 seconds, giving us excellent productivity, repeatability and economies of scale,” he says.
“We used to have five welders doing this job, but we have now upskilled them for work in other areas, such as the fabrication of our Wedge Wire dewatering baskets,” he says.
The Wedge Wire production machine uses stainless steel wire with a wedge profile. This is spiral welded and then flanged to form a basket, typically with ½ mm apertures to a 50 µm tolerance. These baskets are predominantly used for dewatering in the gold mining sector.
Describing refurbishment work, Walker notes that the Supercenter typically manufactures and installs replacement panels and side liners and, when necessary, refurbishes exciter gearboxes. “We are able to disassemble, assess and rebuild exciters to OEM specifications and we have our own exciter test bed to ensure that performance requirements are being met.”
With respect to new builds, Kruger notes that these are currently for export, most recently to Kazakhstan, Turkey and Norway.
“As the regional centre of excellence for the manufacture of vibrating equipment, we have developed local manufacturing capabilities for our exciter gearboxes and for the screens for Kazakhstan, which were locally manufactured in South Africa,” Walker reveals. Three double-deck horizontal screens with isolation frames and rolling frames have already been shipped to Kazakhstan and a further four are currently being manufactured.
“We have total control over the design and manufacture of every component, which is a distinct advantage in that we can optimise the configuration of the screen, the exciters and the media panels to offer simplified operation with seamless panel replacements and equipment servicing.
Kruger adds: “People say that low-cost imports are a threat to our business, but we are finding ways to compete from a quality and cost perspective with imports from any country in the world. In addition, we can still drive exports through our European offices and attract customers from remote and faraway places such as Kazakhstan.”
Being a premium supplier, FLSmidth needs to invest in R&D and value engineering processes. “All over the world there are workshops that will pirate our products for supply into our own aftermarkets. We need to stay ahead of these counterfeiters by constantly improving our solutions, refining assembly procedures and simplifying maintenance,” says Kruger, adding that the South African operation is continuously feeding ideas back to FLSmidth’s central R&D facility in Denmark.
“We at FLSmidth are very customer focused. As well as achieving lowest TCOs, we strive to improve availability, uptime, returns on investment and customer sustainability and profitability. This is at the heart of our business and, therefore, strategic investment is unlikely to stop,” concludes Kruger, adding that the Delmas Supercenter has already taken the decision to further invest in new equipment for the manufacture of polyurethane products, such as latest-generation rotor and stator technology to optimise the performance of its flotation cells.
