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Mechanical Technology — November 2015
⎪
Materials handling and minerals processing
⎪
I
mplementing Metso’s integrated
service and product offering has
resulted in a significant efficiency
boost for the minerals transporta-
tion process of Doña Inés de Collahuasi
in Chile. The Metso solution, delivered
about a year ago, includes gathering and
analysing field data from the chutes, a
new liner design, the manufacture and
assembly of three discharge chutes for
the mine, as well as performance follow-
up and further optimisation to ensure
continuous improvement of the process.
Doña Inés de Collahuasi is Chile’s
third largest producer of copper. The
company’s close co-operation with
Integrated service boosts
materials handling efficiency
Metso changed the design of the chute liners
and streamlined the changeover of anti-wear
plates.
The chute liners are now covered in Poly-Cer
®
, which is designed to be resistant to strong abrasion even
when subjected to high material tonnage at high speeds.
A Metso services solution has resulted in four times less downtime in minerals
transportation for Chilean mining company, Doña Inés de Collahuasi.
Metso has already resulted in important
changes in the design of the chute liners
to improve the maintenance conditions
by streamlining the changeover of anti-
wear plates. The original design had a
mean time between failures (MTBF) of
approximately 20 days, an interval that
has now been extended four-fold to 80
days and, through optimisation, this is
expected to improve further.
“As a company, we look for suppliers
who provide an integrated service that
includes engineering, manufacturing and
assembly. Metso knew how to respond to
our deadlines and objectives. In minerals
transportation we’ve already seen the
MTBF rising from 20 to 80 days, and we
know that the number can be optimised
even further,” explains Manuel Vera, as-
set management and reliability manager
at Minera Doña Inés de Collahuasi.
According to Mauricio Carrasco, wear
products and conveyor belt manager at
Metso: “Providing integrated solutions
is a key demand in the mining industry
today. Our customers are familiar with
Metso’s knowledge and solutions in these
types of processes. They know that our
service experts have both the field experi-
ence and the factory certifications. This
kind of an approach comes naturally to
us, and it also saves our customers the
time involved in having to coordinate with
many different contractors working on the
same project,” says Carrasco.
The chute liners are now covered
in Poly-Cer
®
, which is designed to be
resistant to strong abrasion even when
subjected to high material tonnage at
high speeds. Compared to the classic
liner design, Poly-Cer is designed to
increase liner wear life thanks to greater
resistance, with an estimated operation
of more than 150 days between change-
out. “This lining is usually up to ten times