Engineering & Mining Journal

SEP 2017

Engineering and Mining Journal - Whether the market is copper, gold, nickel, iron ore, lead/zinc, PGM, diamonds or other commodities, E&MJ takes the lead in projecting trends, following development and reporting on the most efficient operating pr

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SCREENING MACHINES SEPTEMBER 2017 • E&MJ; 51 www.e-mj.com ScreenPlanner was introduced to the commercial market about six months ago, said Claes Larsson, Metso's global product manager–screening media. It is designed as a simple, user-friendly tool to help Meto's customers draw more-in- formed conclusions about screen perfor- mance and improvements. South Africa-based Multotec, a spe- cialist mineral processing equipment supplier, also uses deck map methodolo- gy in an ongoing effort to optimize screen output and lifespan, according to Shawn Faba, the company's manufacturing prod- uct manager–screening. "Multotec has built on its concept of the composite deck for more than a decade, and differentiated ourselves by developing the deck map to design specific screening solutions for a wide range of material with various characteristics," Faba said. The panels, he noted, are easily inter- changeable on composite screen decks due to the modular format of Multotec's two common panel sizes: 1 ft x 1 ft or 2 ft x 1 ft. This modular design allows for different types of panels to be placed in specific areas of the screen as part of the overall goal of achieving metallurgical ef- ficiency on the screening media surface. With the aim of reducing downtime for customers, composite deck designs must ensure that wear patterns are as even as possible, so that mean time between fail- ures (MTBF) can be extended and sched- uled maintenance can be conducted as infrequently as possible. "Typically we want to ensure that customers can run these screens for six to eight months at least before they have to schedule maintenance downtime," Faba said. The deck map allows the best combi- nation of panels to be placed to suit the conditions, the material and the output targets — employing panel types in mate- rials including rubber, polyurethane, steel, woven-wire, ceramics, Hardox, fiberglass and combinations of these. For instance, certain applications may demand the use of both ceramics and rubber. While a hard ceramic surface provides resistance to wear and cutting, rubber's elastic proper- ties dampen the impact forces and pro- tect the ceramic pieces. "The deck map allows us to specify, for instance, a set of panels comprising highly impact-resistant material at the feed end of the screen, where the impact of material from the feed box or chute is highest," said Roy Roche, vice president– screening media at Multotec. The performance of the panels is then fine-tuned through monitoring and itera- tion, using Multotec's Hawkeye technol- ogy, which allows management to sys- tematically analyze the data from the deck maps to create a planning system for ongoing application improvement. The screening requirements in each part of the deck can be constantly refined by tracking the performance of the various panel types on each deck in operation. "Modular panels can cut operating costs on screen decks by more than 30% when using iterative improvement tech- niques," said Roche. mclanahan.com

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