Technology and innovation
Technology helps gold rush team compete
The conveyors have to efficiently transport up to 300tph of raw material for 12 hours per day at 2 – 2.3mps.
Photos by Martin Engineering
Gold Rush, a popular television series on the Discovery channel, follows the exploits of three competing mining teams, led by Todd Hoffman, Parker Schnabel, and Tony Beets, as they seek to extract the most placer gold from their operations.
While their operations may be small by commercial mining standards, the competition is fierce. The teams compete for 100 ounces of gold, which gets awarded to the team that mines most of the highly prized mineral.
All three teams try to squeeze the last ounce from their operations. Therefore, the conveyors play a key role. The conveyors have to efficiently transport up to 300 tons per hour( tph) of raw material for 12 hours per day at 2 – 2.3 metres per second( mps). Processing begins when dump trucks empty their loads into a hopper. Rocks larger than 6 ″ are scalped off, and the remaining load gets screened to separate the fines from the bulk. Fines are then run through a sluice box to wash out the gold particles.
“ In a highly competitive situation like this, we have to collect every fraction of an ounce from the source material,” commented Trey Poulson.“ Our goal this season is 5 000 ounces, and we can’ t afford to leave anything behind. So even a small amount of carryback or spillage from the conveyors is a serious issue for us. In these operations, we don’ t have extra manpower, so any downtime for maintenance or repairs can be a disaster for us. We can’ t afford to stop processing and shovel out spillage or make repairs during the 12-hour window that we’ re permitted to operate each day.”
Poulson said his goal is to extract an ounce of gold for every 100 yards of material processed, which is about four truckloads dumping into the hopper. When the team first started the operation, they were using the existing belt scrapers on the conveyors to clean any fines that remained on the belts at the discharge points.“ The original belt cleaners weren’ t as effective as we needed them to be,” said Poulson.“ They were leaving some carryback on the belt, and we even had a couple of them cam over and jam up the conveyors. On one, it actually ripped the belt.”
That’ s when a chance meeting at a trade show gave Poulson the opportunity to meet representatives from Martin Engineering, one of the innovators and premier suppliers of components to make bulk material handling cleaner, safer, and more productive. He stopped by the company’ s exhibit at the event and started a conversation about some of the problems they were experiencing. The reps were confident that Martin components could resolve the issues and help the Hoffman team in its quest to outproduce the competition. Poulson gladly accepted the company’ s offer to supply 316 Mining with high-efficiency belt cleaners.
“ Belt cleaning was one of our biggest obstacles at the time,” he recalled.“ We were wasting both material and labour, and we couldn’ t afford to give that advantage to the competition.”
Martin Engineering technicians travelled to the Colorado site and reviewed the entire conveyor network, recommending specific cleaner designs for each application. On one they recommended the company’ s patented CleanScrape design, which is engineered to provide as much as four times the lifespan of conventional cleaners in difficult applications.“ When I first met with the Martin guys, I had trouble envisioning how it would work. It is unlike anything I have seen in my 20 years of mining. But it has been in service for six months without us having to touch it. And the cleaning performance is great.”
For the wet conveyor, the Martin technicians selected a heavy-duty primary belt cleaner that features unique technology to maintain the most efficient cleaning angle throughout its service life. Equally important given the time constraints of the competition, the blade features a no-tool replacement process that can be performed safely by one person in less than five minutes. For the secondary cleaner, a rugged design with individually cushioned tungsten carbide blades was installed to withstand the punishing conditions.
“ These conveyors experience all the same challenges faced by massive corporate mines,” said Steve McKenna, territory manager at
[ 36 ] MINING MIRROR MAY 2018