A Trio® EF3606 pan feeder installed by Weir Minerals Africa at OMV’s Stilfontein crushing plant has increased production by 40% and helped to create a safer working environment.
Click to download and read pdf
A Trio® EF3606 pan feeder at OMV’s Stilfontein crushing plant has created a safer working environment and resolved an ongoing production problem. OMV’s production target was 1 300 t/day, but the plant could only produce 1 000 t/day. OMV asked Weir Minerals Africa, a longstanding service provider, to help increase the plant’s capacity.
The lack of plant capacity was deemed to be the result of stockpile reclaim chutes becoming regularly blocked, resulting in an inconsistent feed to the cone crushers. As the cone crushers were unable to be choke fed, OMV often experienced inconsistent product, crusher inefficiencies and uneven wear of cone crusher liners. OMV had to monitor constantly and manually clear the feed from the chutes, which presented a considerable safety risk, as rocks would fall out of the chute once the blockage was removed.
To provide a reliable and consistent feed to the cone crushers, a Trio® EF3606 vibrating pan feeder was selected, which is designed to control the feed rate in surge tunnels or under surge bins. Combining the Trio® pan feeder with a variable speed drive (VSD) and a controller (PLC) allows the feeder to alter its speed based on the levels of feed already within the cone crusher’s bins.
Weir Minerals Africa engineers redesigned the chute system using 3D laser scanning equipment to ensure the new structure and chutes would fit within the existing footprint and simulation software was used to optimise the particle flow.
After commissioning, OMV’s capacity was immediately increased to 1 400 t/day, a 40% daily production improvement resulting directly from consistent feed to the cone crusher. Furthermore, no blockages have been experienced since the new feeder was installed. The plant has increased its uptime per shift to as much as 99.5% and the safety risk of clearing the chute has been removed.
