Modern Mining March 2015

MATERIALS HANDLING

based in Canada also offers a similar system under the same name. According to Desmond Soekoe, it most certainly can. “The concept on which Rail-Veyor ® is based was developed in the 1960s by SECCAM, the French railroad operator, but the technology to make it work – such as variable speed drives and fibre-optic communications – didn’t really exist at that time,” he explains. “The point to stress, however, is that the installation at Phakisa was entirely a South African designed and engineered system and was the very first commercial application in the world. We own the intellectual property rights to the system as installed at Phakisa and have taken out a number of international pat- ents on aspects of the technology – for example, the hydraulic drive stations. We manufacture all the elements of the system locally, for the most part in our own workshops. Our only real technology partner is Mitsubishi, represented locally by Adroit Technologies, from whom we source the variable speed drives and the PLCs we use.” An advantage of the Deebar Rail-Veyor ® is its ability to adapt to a customer’s existing infra- structure. As Soekoe says, “The system can handle bends of up to 30 deg and inclines or declines of 11 deg, which would all pose prob- lems for its competitors – locos or conventional conveyors. The Phakisa installation, for exam- ple, has six 30 deg bends along the route and climbs a 1 in 200 incline on the return side of the dedicated haulage route. Design is very site specific and each installation is customised to meet the needs of the site and, of course, the

many enhancements over the Phakisa Rail- Veyor ® . These include a new tubular design for the supporting structures, a pneumatic tensioning system, a braking system and a new SCADA logging reporting system, which will deliver accurate production statistics to management. Most readers of Modern Mining will be familiar with the Deebar Rail-Veyor ® concept but, to recap, it is a bulk material transport system described by Deebar as being based on the principle of a roller coaster, where a train consisting of a series of articulated trough- like, two-wheeled cars runs on light rails up inclines, down hills and around bends on a rail that can turn back 180 deg within 30 m. Each car is connected to the car in front by means of a swivel clevis that allows articulated move- ment for curves and dumping. Sealing of the gap between cars is maintained by the use of overlapping flexible rubber flaps that prevent spillage of the material and also operate as dis- charge chutes for dumping the load. Traction is provided by a number of equally spaced, energy efficient, dual drive stations, together with tyres in contact with the side drive plates of the cars, thus providing forward thrust. Drive stations only switch on through sensors as the train arrives near a drive sta- tion and switch off once the train has passed through. This means that at any one time only two sets of drives are running per train, result- ing in a major saving in energy costs. An interesting question is whether the Deebar Rail-Veyor ® can be described as a South African development, given that a company

The North West installation features a new tubular design for the supporting structures, a pneumatic tensioning system, a braking system and a new SCADA logging reporting system.

34  MODERN MINING  March 2015