Recently expanded and upgraded with a significant investment, the FLSmidth Supercenter at Delmas in Mpumalanga Province is now one of the few facilities that manufactures both large vibrating screens and screen media panels at the same plant.
This offers substantial advantages for customers, according to Warren Walker, Operations Manager at the FLSmidth Delmas Supercenter, including a seamless solution that drives down the cost of ownership of screening installations.
A SAG mill discharge vibrating screen on an isolation frame.
“With our high levels of experience and expertise, we are able to view each screen installation holistically, engineering not just the best screen option for a particular application but also the most appropriate screen media panel solution,” says Walker. “This allows not only the large vibrating screens to be produced at our facility but also the screen media panels.”
He highlights that this single source supply is locally manufactured to the highest levels of quality, delivering cost effective solutions to local and global markets. The FLSmidth Delmas Supercenter is a regional Product Centre of Excellence for the FLSmidth group, with ISO 9001:2015, OSHAS 18001:2007 and ISO 14001:2015 accreditations underpinning its focus on quality, safety and environmental sustainability.
The well-equipped facility includes CNC machining capabilities and a dedicated vibration-damped test bed that facilitates comprehensive factory acceptance testing of up to 50-tonne machines for the highest level of quality assurance.
“This state-of-the-art facility in South Africa shows the commitment of FLSmidth to the South African market as well as the continent as a whole,” Walker says. “With our solid production engineering capability, our levels of excellence and the requisite certification, this manufacturing operation is ideally placed to supply the global market with large machinery.”
As large vibrating screens require very specialised manufacturing processes and capabilities, Walker emphasises the specialised welding skill sets and procedures in place. Screens in operation are subjected to gigacycle fatigue, so the stringent and globally accepted welding procedure AS/NSZ 1554 Part 5 is applied to ensure the quality, profile and integrity of each weld.
“Our skilled coded welders, monitored by our in-house quality control inspectors, ensure that all quality procedures are adhered to during manufacturing,” he says.
For vibration analysis, a resident FLSmidth service engineer conducts the factory acceptance test (FAT). This data is then analysed and verified by the engineering team at the FLSmidth Technology Centre of Excellence in Brisbane, Australia. This centre is responsible for the design and engineering of FLSmidth vibrating screens.
“Close communication between the Australia-based engineers and the South African facility ensures that screens are engineered specifically for each given application and meet all the operating parameters,” says Chris Gordon, FLSmidth’s Chief Engineer of Vibrating Screens in Brisbane.
His team develops the appropriate screening solution usually after FLSmidth engineers visit the customer’s site to assess the specific requirements. He notes that the Brisbane operation has all the necessary in‑house procedures, resident expertise and experience. It also has an established database of information on successful applications of FLSmidth screening technology.
“During the engineering process, we make use of sophisticated software including finite element analysis,” he says. “Importantly, this is an integral in-house function at FLSmidth and is not outsourced to a third party.”
The advantage of keeping all these activities in-house is that the engineer involved in the original data analysis and engineering of the screen is also involved in analysing the FAT data. In addition to the inherent insight this gives FLSmidth engineers, they also use the global database of installed screens to access valuable information on root cause failure analysis and other analytical data.
A recent order undergoing the FAT process at FLSmidth Delmas is for a copper-mining operation in Kazakhstan. The order comprises three vibrating screens, two of which are 3,6 m wide by 8,5 m in length and mounted on isolation frames. One of these screens will be installed in an existing SAG mill circuit on the mine, while the other is a standby unit. This is a retrofit application and because of the existing plant’s support structure it was necessary to provide a screening system that incorporates an isolation frame.
An innovative design concept was also applied, and the screens will be installed on rolling frames. “This eliminates the need to shutdown the plant when screen maintenance or repair is necessary as the complete screen can be rolled out and replaced by the standby screen, reducing unnecessary downtime and allowing maintenance activities to be conducted more easily,” Gordon explains.
The third machine is 3,6 m wide by 7,3 m long and this double deck vibrating screen will be positioned at the discharge end of a HPGR (high pressure grinding roll). It also has an integral isolation frame.
All screens are equipped with polyurethane panels on both the upper and lower decks with the screen media panel layout optimised to ensure screening efficiency.
Another important engineering focus is to optimise screen designs wherever possible to allow for a high commonality of componentry. This allows customers to reduce on site inventories reducing total cost of ownership. Examples in this case would include the exciter gearboxes and all structural members including cross beams, feed boxes, drives beams and back members, and springs.
