SOURCE: Mining/Engineering | October 18, 2024
Weir unveiled its new ENDURON® Elite screen at MINExpo. This large, high-capacity machine is one of the biggest screens on the market. Ideally suited to large high rock operations, it’s a double-deck banana screen, available in a range of sizes with the largest weighing in at close to 50 tonnes and a deck measuring 4.3m x 9.7m.
The ENDURON® Elite screens are driven by Weir’s new ETX exciters, allowing to drive these massive screens with just two exciters. Other machines of comparable size require three exciters.
Notably, this delivers significant advantages in terms of efficiency, lowering energy consumption, as well as simplifying the maintenance requirements.
While ENDURON® Elite screens can be utilised in any screening duties in the mill circuit with the exception of primary screening, one specific application these screens have been developed for is to be fed by Weir’s ENDURON® HPGR.
Weir has been developing a transformational flowsheet in which traditional tumbling mills are replaced by HPGRs and vertical stirred mills, reducing energy consumption by 40%. The ENDURON® Elite screen has a vital role to play in this circuit.
In short, the transformational flowsheet is a closed circuit with the ENDURON® HPGR discharge feeding the ENDURON® Elite screen. The oversize material from both top and bottom decks is recycled back to the HPGR, while the bottom deck undersize product is fed to the vertical stirred mill.
These big banana screens are able to separate material efficiently at small cut sizes, ensuring that Weir can offer a single mill flowsheet, allowing miners to significantly reduce their energy consumption and operating costs, compared to traditional tumbling mills.
Monitoring and maintenance
The ENDURON® Elite screens come equipped with polyurethane panels, which allows the machine to achieve the required cut size. Rubber panels are also available, depending on the application.
Screens are subjected to very high levels of stress, so good, rigorous maintenance procedures are essential to ensuring they perform effectively for the duration of their life.
It’s vital to continuously inspect and monitor liners. When the rubber wears away and the material comes into direct contact with steel, the likelihood of screen failure increases significantly. Put simply, if you add wear and corrosion to fatigue, then you’re likely to have problems. Hence, it’s crucial that the wear protection remains intact.
It’s equally as important to monitor the health of the exciters and bearings. The exciters on the ENDURON® Elite screens are huge, so monitoring the temperature of the bearings and changing the oil regularly is critical. Maintenance procedures should also include making sure the springs remain clean and free of debris.
Elite screens can also be digitally enabled, providing the operator with greater visibility of equipment health and performance, as well as providing the opportunity for process optimisation.
Weir’s intelligent solutions monitor bearing health, temperature, vibrations, acceleration, throw angle and overall screen health.
Condition monitoring solutions provide a holistic view of the equipment from a health and performance perspectives. Weir’s intelligent solutions integrate multiple data sources from IIoT sensors on the equipment and the process around it, as well as back-end data sources, such as its ERP (enterprise resource planning), engineering systems and product master data systems.
This allows Weir to build intelligent formulas that provide actionable insights, recommendations and event intelligence beyond what any typical condition monitoring system can do.
For instance, as an OEM, Weir is able to integrate the design, manufacturing, operating and maintenance data of its ENDURON® Elite screens, combined with the live IIoT sensor data, to deliver an algorithm able to generate predictive recommendations on equipment operation.
These recommendations are then automatically ‘pushed’ to the customer or, if in place, Weir service staff, alerting them to a potential problem ahead of time, as well as recommended actions to take.
These individual pieces of intelligent equipment can then be made to talk to each other, which then allows for the optimisation of entire flowsheets.
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