Yard work: stackers, reclaimers and other stockyard equipment

Given its critical importance for the mining, port and raw material export sectors, Brazil represents a strategic market in which the TAIM WESER group is rapidly expanding. The award of this project is further confirmation of the company’s importance and strong presence in the South American markets and specifically in Brazil, where its subsidiary,TAIM CADE DO BRASIL, has been operating in Curitiba since 2006.

 

The four stacker-reclaimers will be responsible for the storage and stacking of iron ore into the stockyard. The machines have a stacking capacity of 10,000tph and a reclaim capacity of 12,000tph. Each machine is supplied with its own rail track. Some of the outstanding features of the machinery include the length of the boom, which is 60m long, and the 12m span between rails.

 

TAIM WESER is a Spanish group operating on a worldwide scale, specializing in high- technology turnkey projects. With factories in 60 countries and over 100 years of experience,TAIM WESER provides solutions oriented towards streamlining industrial processes in a sustainable, environmentally friendly approach in the following sectors: bulk materials handling, lifting, waste treatment and renewable energy.

Thanks to its proprietary technology and patents, the TAIM WESER group has become an international reference, present in all leading world markets, where it is noted for its management resources. TAIM WESER is committed to innovation and technology; to people, total quality and competitiveness. These values, along with the extensive experience acquired, afford the company a perfect understanding of the sectors in which it operates, preparing it to meet all of its customers’ needs.

 

INDONESIA: SUPPORTING AN EXPANDING ECONOMY
With the Indonesian economy now forecast to grow around 6.5% in 2011 the country looks forward to a new period of domestic development driven by both urbanization and infrastructure expansion creating a strong demand for both energy and cement.
Of course Indonesia is a strong exporter of coal and ranks amongst the world’s largest for thermal coal with India developing as one of its most important export destinations. Investment plans are in progress to develop new and improved coal transportation infrastructure particularly by railroad in South Sumatra with a new rail link at 270km representing a major boost for the whole regional economy.
Infrastructure developments in particular consume vast volumes of concrete as the primary construction material leading to a rapid development of cement demand. With an increase in sales reported at plus 13% in 2010 the cement industry is expanding rapidly.
Schade joined the Aumund Group in 2001 and benefits from Aumund’s close connections to the cement market extending to the storage and blending of raw materials, additives and fuels. Recent contracts within Indonesia include large bridge reclaimers for blending the limestone raw material of cement manufacture, with a reclaim rate of 1,200tph (tonnes per hour), plus smaller cantilevered boom machines for additives such as silica, gypsum, clay and iron ore.
In particular PT Semen Gresik has installed such equipment at its Tuban and Tonasa plants including a total of five units delivered in 2010 alone. Both of these new plants are scheduled for full operation in 2013 and include comprehensive facilities for incorporating alternative, carbon-neutral, fuels such as rice husk, tobacco waste and oil sludge in the kiln fuel mix to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, targeted substitution will reach
around 7.5% by 2012. Nevertheless the main fuel for the kiln remains substantially locally sourced coal although the ratio will reduce as the level of alternative fuel substitution increases it is likely the volume will increase as production ramps up.
The bridge reclaimers for these new projects with PT Semen Gresik incorporate travelling tripper cars, supplied by Schade, to distribute the material within the storage building. For the limestone storage, the tripper conveyor system has a belt width of 2,000mm and a design handling rate of 2,000tph. For the additives section, the tripper car is designed for a belt width of 800mm and a handling rate of typically 300tph. The control of the tripper car travel is linked to the operation of the reclaimer to ensure no overlap of working zones and permitting simultaneous stacking and reclaim.
The electrical and control systems integration of the stacking and reclaim operations is critical to the success of the system as a whole and generally forms part of the Schade responsibility although the electrical equipment may be locally supplied and installed.
Whilst there are extensive land-based infrastructure developments in progress throughout the country with 922 inhabited islands clearly waterborne transportation is a vital part of the economy. This is especially true for the bulk transportation of coal from the mine sites to the export terminals or in many cases to offshore floating transshipment facilities.
Typically on the Mahakam River coal is mined up-country and floated down to the coast on large towed or even self propelled barges in the range of 7,000dwt to 10,000dwt. At the cement plant, the stacking of the imported coal from such river barges is a typical application for the Schade longitudinal storage systems with portal reclaimers as illustrated in the picture above. In this application coal is discharged from river barges using a gantry grab crane and loaded to conveyors for transfer to a travelling radial boom stacker arranged to service two parallel longitudinal stockpiles. Schade pioneered this solution in the German coal industry servicing the many coal-fired power plants of the Ruhr valley, starting in the 1960s and today Schade is still delivering stackers and reclaimers to the German power utilities both for coal and for flue gas de-sulphurized gypsum (synthetic gypsum) produced as a by-product, also in large quantities, and now used extensively in the cement and board industries as a substitute for natural gypsum with obvious environmental benefits.
AUSTRALIA: ECONOMIES OF SCALE AT THE MINE SITES
Schade are building on its recent successes in Australia with the stacker and reclaimer equipment supplied to Blackwater, Dawson and Lake Lindsay. The Blackwater mine complex in particular is an interesting example of how the market is moving towards high performance centralized coal preparation plant supporting a number of individual mine sites within its local catchment area. At Blackwater six major opencast mining operations feed the new central prep-plant using a combination of heavy haul trucks, belly dumpers and eight triple side dumper rigs.
The mines are owned by the BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA).
Medium volatile hard coking coal, medium volatile weak coking coal and medium volatile thermal coal is exported from here to Japan, Asia, South America, Europe and the Middle East plus thermal coal is also sold to the domestic market. Proven reserves are greater than 800mt (million tonnes) and the new prep-plant is designed to produce some 14mt per annum. This project was Australia’s largest ever turnkey design and construct coal handling and preparation plant contract.
Coal is delivered to either of 3 x 600-tonne intake hoppers and is fed from the hoppers using apron feeders through three stages of crushing where it is reduced from a maximum of 1,200mm
down to a typical size of –50mm. The coal may be directed to a blending stockpile of 60,000 tonnes capacity from which the coal is transferred to the washery and then to product stockpiles. Or, using bifurcated chutes, the washery may be bypassed and the coal directed to the product stockpiles for stacking out ready for reclaim to the batch weigh rapid train load-out facility capable of loading 7,000-tonne trains in 1.4 hours.
This new prep-plant replaces three older style plants providing state of the art facilities at a single operating location with the associated economies of scale expected of a modern automated facility. In addition the single prep-plant requires a single rail line thereby reducing associated rail network Capex and operating costs and avoiding interference to the mining operations caused by through rail links.
The Schade circular storage with radial and luffing stacker and bridge style reclaimer provides the necessary blending of varying grades of coal received from different parts of the mine complex. In this case the radial stacker has a design handling capacity of 2,200tph and the reclaimer operates at 1,800tph to feed the
dual module washery. Operating with multiple mine sites with varying coal qualities the ability to effectively blend the material at high capacity is critical to the operation of these larger centralized coal preparation plants. Using the radial and luffing boom stacker a layered stockpile is generated automatically such that at any point along the stockpile a cross section would yield samples of coal from every source. Using the circular concept the output may be maintained without interruption as the blending bed is continuously generated and recovered as the stacker and reclaimer work together around the central column.
This is a different concept to the strategic longitudinal stockpile where the coal is stacked out in discrete sections to be recovered by a portal reclaimer working along the pile between selected fixed points. In a larger preparation plant such as Blackwater handling varying coal types including metallurgical and thermal qualities, the longitudinal stockpile allows segregation of these varying coal specifications. In this situation the Schade twin boom portal reclaimer is the ideal solution able to recover some 4,000tph per unit which is more than sufficient to feed the rapid train load-out.
Centralized high-performance coal preparation is also a feature of the Lake Lindsay complex in Australia where the coal is brought to the 800tph capacity prep-plant from three existing mining sources plus from the Lake Lindsay lease including a combination of truck and conveyor haulage. At 21km. this was, at the time, the longest single flight conveyor in the southern hemisphere. This concept implies crushing and screening at the mine site combining the flexibility of truck haulage to the in-pit crusher and the operational economies of conveyor haulage to the central prep-plant and rapid train load-out station.
Schade supplied longitudinal blending beds using a travelling luffing boom stacker and bridge type reclaimers with dual harrows enabling reclaim from both travel directions with a rated handling capacity of 1,000tph. The project included two portal reclaimers for the finished product coal each rated at
3,300tph to feed the rapid train load-out station in the same manner as already described.
SOUTH AFRICA: SUCCESSFUL COOPERATION
South Africa is another top-rank world supplier of thermal coal and one of the major players here is also the local incarnation of Australian miner BHP Billiton. The company has invested heavily in the Douglas-Middelburg Optimisation (DMO) Project, with a published expected capital investment of US$975 million. The project will enable BHP Billiton to maintain energy coal exports from the combined Douglas Colliery and Middleburg Mining Services operations at around current levels of approximately 9.5mt annually (BHP Billiton share) whilst also fulfilling domestic contractual commitments.
The DMO project scope includes utilizing reserves across the Douglas and Middelburg Mine Services (MMS) collieries and development of new mining areas with low strip ratio coal, with ROM (run of mine) coal being fed into a new 14mt/annum coal processing plant, which incorporates a Schade circular storage system to receive and blend the various coals at a handling rate of some 2,300tph. After washing and removal of general impurities the clean product coal is stacked out using a travelling, radial and luffing boom stacker. In this operation a large twin boom style portal reclaimer will be employed with a continuous handling rate of 3,000tph (a picture of a similar unit can be seen on p46).
The stockyard equipment will be supplied under licence by Schade which has been supplying stockyard technology to Bateman Engineering (materials handling contractor) since 1980. This contract is a first between Schade and Bateman Engineering in that the scope is split: Schade will be supplying the core mechanical equipment and project engineering from Europe and the structural fabrstory for Schade where, with effective operational control, the economies of Chinese fabrication may be combined with key components from Europe, along with project and quality management plus engineering services from Schade in Germany and assembled on site with proper supervision by Schade trained engineers at all stages of the contract.
Bateman Engineering will be supplying the electrical and instrumentation system from South Africa that is including the electrical interfaces to the associated plant and safety systems.
CUSTOMIZED WAGON UNLOADING SYSTEMS
Schade has expanded into the rail wagon tippler market with a range of tippler designs able to handle applications through to large power plant or coal terminals.These include the original
Aumund style tippler, now known as the ‘O’ Frame, plus the ‘C’ Frame and ‘Pivot’ Frame designs, all available with a range of wagon positioners and indexers allowing the complete automation of the coal intake facility. These standard designs are now expanded to include a combined random wagon and unit train tippler based on the ‘C’ Frame principle that allows clients to unload either random wagons (that are uncoupled during the tipping cycle) or unit train wagons (that remain coupled together during the tipping cycle); in the same machine.
This concept of using the same tippler for both styles of rail wagons is particularly suitable for new mines or terminals that are expected to increase production levels in discrete phases as the operation develops over time. In the initial implementation phase the customer can operate low cost random wagons andicated steel components will be supplied by Schade from approved workshops in China. This is a familiar later change to unit trains (fitted with rotary couplings) without changes to the wagon unloading system except perhaps the addition of an extra wagon positioner to reach optimum system performance. In this manner the initial investment in the rolling stock is kept to a minimum allowing the client to generate a revenue stream before upgrading.
Schade has also developed a specialized construction concept for low ambient temperature environments with a simplified design focusing on mechanical actuation instead of hydraulic systems. This is an economical solution with reduced capital and maintenance costs working in extreme operating conditions.
With the expanded range of designs Schade is able to satisfy the requirements of specific markets and operators and in particular the recently updated new general specifications for wagon tipplers published by Indian Railways.
THE AUMUND GROUP
The Aumund Group, headquartered in Germany has a long and illustrious history in the mining and latterly in the cement business worldwide generally handling hot and aggressive materials in continuous process plant where reliability operating 24/7 is vital.
Schade, an Aumund subsidiary since 2001, goes back to 1879 and the early days of coal mining in the Ruhr valley. From the 1950s the name of Schade has been synonymous with the development of large-scale stacker and reclaimer equipment found from the coal preparation plant at the mine site through to the export terminal and power and process plant and in the cement industry handling solid fuels and ack in 1991 Aumund acquired the Louise Company of Germany including all of the original Louise products such as the CentrexTM silo discharger and the Rotary Discharge Machine plus a range of drag chain conveyors now all fully integrated to the Aumund product range.
To complete the picture B&W Mechanical Handling Ltd. was acquired by Aumund back in 2002 bringing the SamsonTM surface feeder plus mobile stacking and ship loading solutions to the group portfolio adding the benefit of performance with flexibility where permanent fixed solutions would not be viable.
To support the manufacturing companies Aumund has established local subsidiaries in key markets worldwide along with an extensive network of