With swathes of ground flooded product flow, materials handling and production have been disrupted in major coal areas and iron ore, lithium, nickel and gold regions, just as demand and prices for those minerals soars.
Cut to Size managing director Laurie Green said all the moisture brought by the rain made coal sticky, heavier and harder to handle for miners and those involved in its transport to ports and power stations.
"When using wet or hard-to-handle coal, for example, the use of high molecular weight polyethylene plastic chute liners has become a number one method to improve the flowability of coal chutes," he said.
"This climate change issue is not likely to go away any time soon and high-flow liners are one way of effecting major improvements promptly."
Green said the same benefits applied to harder mineral ores, where clogging, production hang-ups and loading and unloading issues could cause costly production interruptions and safety issues.
Cut to Size provides miners, transport operators, ports and stockpilers with custom-engineered plastics for wear prevention and flow jobs, which are used with high-density polyethylene.
Green said the combined use of Wearex and HDPE provided the best combination of wear-resistance and cost-efficiency.
"It is certainly not one size fits all," he said.
"The process of engineering plastic selection and formulation is a scientifically demanding business in which we rely on our own expertise supported by some of the world's leading suppliers of product."
Green said as well as chute liners, UHMWPE and other tough engineering plastics were used to line bin and transport trays.
"One of the big problems is the variability of throughput," he said.
"Good operators can account for specific moisture content or rock content coming down the line or going on the trucks, but the material coming through may not be consistent and one lot will be wetter than the next, the next lot will have more rock and so on."
Green said addressing the problem holistically sometimes involved lining chute systems and truck trays with materials that gave high slip performance right across the spectrum.
When used as a wear liner, UHMWPE does not cake or stick to metal and offers noise abatement in material handling applications.
UHMWPE resin has a molecular weight range of 3-6 million, compared to 300,000-500,000 for high molecular weight resins.
Green said CTSP machined liners to size and shape for individual user needs and provide fasteners to secure UHMWPE to metal, which allowed the UHMWPE to expand and float.
"We also consider the fact that changes in moisture and particle size affect the product's flowability, with materials sticking to the hopper walls negatively affecting productivity," he said.
"Traditional steel surfaces also become rough and corroded over time, compounding the problems and increasing the loss in productivity."
