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PLANT ENGINEERING 34 E&MJ; • JANUARY 2017 www.e-mj.com Using modeling software from Bentley Systems, Tetra Tech was able to fit a plant expansion in a small footprint and save the mining company a substantial sum. Detailed Engineering for the Tanami Expansion For an expansion project to upgrade plant capacity at Newmont's Tanami gold mine, located in the Tanami desert in Australia's Northern Territory, Tetra Tech Proteus ac- cepted the challenge of installing addition- al equipment in a constrained footprint. Basically, the scope of the work included the addition of a new ball mill, two new gravity concentration circuits, a pre-leach thickener, a new electrowinning cell and a deslime and tailings filtration system. Ultimately, the objective of the pro- ject was to improve the processing plant's throughput by 300,000 metric tons per year (mt/y) from 2.3 million mt/y to 2.6 million mt/y. Using the OpenPlant PID software de- veloped by Bentley Systems, Tetra Tech generated all the piping and instrumen- tation diagrams (P&IDs;) required for the detailed engineering phase of the pro- ject. Multiple design changes occurred throughout the life of the project and the system provided an efficient means to re- tain and modify the information attached to the P&IDs.; Details for the existing 20-year-old plant were provided by Newmont in terms of previous 3-D models generated via multiple software platforms and a de- tailed point cloud of the current plant. Tetra Tech used Bentley tools to convert this into a comprehensive and detailed 3-D model of the plant. Piping was mod- eled in OpenPlant Modeler and structure and concrete were modeled in AECOSim. Using saved/cached views from these packages allowed Tetra Tech to auto- matically generate annotated plans and elevations of the plant for the required client deliverables. An Isometrics Manager platform was used to auto-generate close to "no-touch" piping isometric drawings directly from the 3-D piping model. The intelligence from this was used to automatically gen- erate Material Take-Offs (MTOs) for the piping, concrete and structural steel. Using these tools, Tetra Tech brought an old plant back to life within a smaller footprint than would have otherwise been feasible. These various design and modeling plat- forms allowed the engineers to share pro- ject information and data between the en- gineering office and the field, and through various phases of the project. Engineers with Newmont and Tetra Tech could re- view designs, visualizing potential opera- tional and maintenance issues, as well as clash detection. The OpenPlant PID significantly re- duced drafting time as altering compo- nents or splitting drawings did not require components to be re-tagged. As the de- sign information changed, the engineer- ing data could be batch uploaded into the P&IDs; directly and then the drawings were re-synched with the database. This reduced the P&ID; drafting hours by a few hours per drawing. Using the Isometrics Manager, Tetra Tech reduced its isometric generation time from 3 hours to 1 hour per isomet- ric. With more than 1,500 isometrics, this saved Newmont about $250,000. Moreover, the technology also im- proved safety. The 3-D model was used for HAZOPs and design review sessions. The accuracy of the model enabled clear discussion on access and egress meth- ods, maintenance methods, crane access and crane lifting studies within a tight footprint. far as who entered the system, what they did and what time they did it," Almond said. "People can be held accountable." The systems are also more reliable and robust than they used to be, and they are also more technically complex. "In the past, the plant had to have someone on- site who was properly trained and could tune the systems for changing strate- gies," Almond said. "It's not easy for every plant to have a person like that on site with today's shortage of skills. Those people are not abundant. Using the inter- net, multiple plants can have access to expertise from a central location." "The rapid collection of real-time data is not worth much if it is not used real time—and above all you have to know where you want to go," he said. "Operators often concentrate on improving one or two variables, such as reducing costs, lowering capital intensity or increasing throughput. However, a holistic focus on drivers of pro- ductivity that is shared at multiple levels is what is needed. With all the new technol- ogies, the winners in the industry will be those who integrate their operations and rationalize their infrastructure. "A lot of mining executives are talking about productivity improvements," Al- mond said. "Unfortunately, that process is not moving at the pace with which it could move." Looking toward the future, Almond sees automation specifically as an area where mining companies the greatest gains associated with optimization.