Cradle to grave
A new mobile water station has been
developed to provide safe drinking water
for remote workforces in the mining
industry.
“Hydration stations from Bluewater
offer tangible benefits to mining operators
where providing drinking water can
be logistically challenging and costly,”
says James Steere, Bluewater Africa
Operations Director.
Andrew Cooper, MD of FreshCamp
Services, has 20 years of experience in
logistics, site mobilisation and day-to-day
contractor village management, and says
that provision of clean drinking water
can account for as much as 10% of the
catering costs for mining operations.
“Basically, the more remote you are,
the more complicated delivering clean
water becomes. There are places where
even treated water may be unsuitable
for drinking. In some cases, water is
transported in tanked vehicles from
site to site, transferred at each site to
an overhead tank, then reverse osmosis
(RO) treated again before being fed into
the camp water system. It’s all highly
inefficient,” says Cooper.
Bluewater has been piloting its mobile
water trailer and an add-on micro water
purification plant since late 2018.
A single Bluewater Trailer can
purify and dispense up to 2 000 litres
of drinking water on site per day from
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The FLSmidth EcoTails tailings solution is a game changing opportunity for the mining sector.
most water sources. The trailer’s compact
design enables multiple water points to be
established around an operating site and the
mobility allows for on or offsite centralised
water purification. Where multiple trailers
are required, Bluewater has developed a small
treatment plant at which trailers can refill
before delivery to teams, effectively creating a
highly efficient hub-and-spoke treatment and
delivery process. The treatment plant uses a patented
SuperiorOsmosis purification technology and
requires a 5m x 5m area to set up and operate.
It can even generate safe drinking water from
normally tough-to-purify brackish or borehole
water. The 3m-long Bluewater Trailer also uses
Bluewater technology to further purify the
water and offers chilled and sparkling water
from multiple dispenser points mounted into
the sides of each trailer.
based approach, as opposed to a loading
time-based approach, since the latter is
based on theoretical total time and is more
likely to give an inaccurate reflection of
actual production capacity.
With a calendar time-based OEE
analysis, then, several additional factors
affecting productivity are taken into
account namely:
• Unscheduled downtime (breakdowns/
failures);
• Scheduled and unscheduled
maintenance;
• Idle time (e.g., operator lunch breaks);
• Waiting time (e.g., when a shovel waits
for a truck to be loaded/unloaded);
• Inactivity during moves between sites;
and
• Environmental disruptions
(e.g. unsuitable terrain, etc.). Hitachi Construction Machinery supplies
one third of all the hydraulic mining
excavators in the world. According
to the company the modular designs
employed in the newer technology Hitachi
machines make for timeous and effortless
maintenance routines, which play a
significant role in production optimisation.
Better horsepower output, efficient
engines, ergonomically designed cabs,
advanced hydraulics, tough frames, and
powerful arm- and bucket-digging forces
improve the robustness of the machines,
which maximises production time to get
the job done.
This also makes for lower total cost of
ownership, as the customer benefits from
additional value over time. For example, a
renowned mining customer has reported
seeing extended life on main components
purchased with the equipment such as
the rigid dump truck wheel units, on
which they have achieved in excess of
25 000 hours through the application of
maintenance tactics in partnership with
Hitachi’s site support personnel. With
a very closely managed and monitored
maintenance plan they aim to manage
these components to 50 000 hours.
Benchmarking reliability
The South African mining industry has
performed poorly over the past 10 years,
with its contribution to the national
GDP having halved since 1994. Year-on-
year production fell by 3.3% in January,
according to Statistics South Africa, with
downtime, power outages and uncertainty
around regulatory policies hampering
production.
Addressing the major constraints
impeding the sector’s growth and
development could result in annual
expansion of between 3% and 4% up to the
year 2020, and the creation of thousands of
jobs and greater potential investor interest.
One of the major contributors to losses
in productivity and profit is downtime, and
on the surface this is attributed either to
maintenance or mechanical failure, with
these alone having a significant impact on
production and profitability. However, a
deeper look into the actual typical operating
conditions in the mining environment reveals
that there are levels of downtime beyond
these two.
A closer approximation of actual
production time can be reached by
applying an OEE (Overall Equipment
Efficiency) analysis on a calendar time-
www.miningmirror.co.za
From this, it is clear that the true cost
of downtime is notably higher in reality
than in theory, and since many of these
factors are beyond the control of managers
and personnel, it clearly illustrates the
importance of quality and reliability of the
equipment itself to the overall viability of a
mining enterprise.
JULY 2019 MINING MIRROR [37]