Tom Woods, TW managing director and partner in value-adding company Chute Technology, said some coal and iron ore producers’ efforts to achieve substantial increases have frustrated by bottlenecks that emerge when they accelerate one part of the production chain only to find that problems then emerge in another.

“During the good times with high prices it was sometimes okay to tolerate production and load-out system that limped along at partial capacity,” Woods said.

“This was because of bottlenecks that were not always obvious at lower production rates, but they showed up at higher production throughputs when the choking points slowed down the entire operation to the pace of the slowest part.

“Sometimes even major plants didn’t realise they had a problem. They didn’t even have to acknowledge it existed, until they tried to boost production past previous levels. Then it could get ugly.”

The Chute Technologies partnership employs a combination of three modern materials handling technologies to boost production outputs in existing coal and ore processing plants by as much as 50%.

These technologies were employed by the partnership recently at a Hunter Valley underground coal mine that was seeking to increase production capacity from a previous level of 1200 tons a day to accommodate production surges up to 2200 tons a day.

The mine installed a number of new production units to feed more coal to its conveyors, which it sped up to accommodate the increased volumes. Accelerating the belts was necessary because of restrictions on belt widths.

“Unfortunately, the increased product flows resulting from these improvements upstream in the production process ran into problems when they hit the chutes and materials handling system downstream in the process,” Woods said.

“The boosted output – and sometimes different stickier grades of product – caused blockages and hang-ups, resulting in lost days and safety hazards as the mess spilled over and had to be cleaned up.

“It was the sort of problem that operational people may not be aware exists until it all goes wrong one day and they realise they have a systemic problem rather than isolated issues.”

Chute Technologies addressed the problem at the Hunter mine by applying a combination of three skill sets which are more typically considered in isolation from each other, in a piecemeal fashion.

The company’s review of operations included advanced engineering analysis of material flow properties; followed by verification with 3D Discrete Element Method (DEM) design processes; and custom manufacturing to individual plant needs.

Woods said the combined technologies – which are applicable to new as well as existing coal and ore projects – produced the most cost-efficient and speedy way to comprehensively and permanently remedy the problem without having to resort to complete new plant.

The approach was the culmination of work done by TW Woods and the broad engineering and technology experience of Dennis Pomfret Engineering and McKajj Services, including the project management, engineering and drafting experience of director Gary Telford.

“The combination of technologies enabled us to produce a complete overview of the plant and focus on the weak spots [and] because we got a complete overview of where problems were occurring, we didn’t have to tear out everything and start again or spend months picking through individual problems,” Pomfret said.