VIBRAMECH Record sales and new product rollout

Southern Africa’s largest privately owned vibrating equipment manufacturer, Vibramech , has achieved record sales after celebrating its 45th milestone year.

will enable the monitoring of all aspects of Vibramech vibrating equipment 24/7, providing continuous vibration monitoring of the equipment’s operational parameters, such as vibration frequency, stroke, angle of the motion and temperature to detect and diagnose machine faults. Such monitoring provides added insurance for machine performance.

Vibrating equipment plays a crucial role in minerals processing, and is widely used for classification, dewatering, medium recovery, scalping, trash removal, grading and desliming. Due to this crucial role, early fault detection, diagnosis and analysis become important to continuously reduce and eliminate costly, unscheduled downtime and unexpected breakdowns.

The company wishes to paytribute to all of its clients forthis affirmation of their trustin Vibramech’s equipment. The personal touch added by being owner-managed allows for greater flexibility in catering for its customers’ unique requirements and considerably improves turnaround times in the design phase.

Vibramech supplies its equipment to mining and mineral processing industries throughout Africa, Eurasia, Australasia, North and South America. The company’s equipment is operating in processing plants, ocean vessels and mining operations world-wide. Vibramech has extensive experience in gold, diamond, coal, iron ore, manganese, platinum, chrome, nickel, uranium, copper, lithium, mineral sands and aggregate operations.

As an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), Vibramech consistently produces a proven and comprehensive range of vibrating equipment, including, but not limited to: multislope (or banana) screens, horizontal and inclined screens, dewatering screens, primary and secondary sizing screens, crusher product screens, degrit screens, floats and sinks screens, classifying screens, XRT and X-ray prep screens and feeders, DMS feeders, grizzly feeders, pan feeders, tubular feeders and grease tables.

All equipment is manufactured inhouse by Vibramech at its 32,000m2 premises in Chamdor, 35 km West of Johannesburg, South Africa. Almost every piece of equipment is tailor-made to suit a client’s specific requirements, from both a plant layout viewpoint and process considerations.

A Technological Breakthrough

Vibramech also celebrates the successful roll-out of their Vibrasure online and remote monitoring system. Vibrasure igital agricultural services have proliferated across Africa over the last decade (bit.ly/3HeZaM7). Most are services that work on mobile phones, although more advanced technologies are in use, too: like satellite images, sensors, blockchains and big data analytics. The services offer access to information, markets and financial products.

This system employs structural and bearing sensors designed with the latest technology. All sensors are IP69K rated and have long-life integral batteries that can withstand the harshest of conditions, and it reports key parameters to a cloud based platform, and those values can be trended over time and provide significant benefits to optimise the performance of vibrating equipment.

Vibramech and/or their clients can, as required, receive real-time notifications on vibration patterns and bearing temperatures via email, mobile phone messaging or PLC. This will eliminate the occurrence of unplanned downtime due to normally unnoticed detrimental operational issues. This will add to the renowned and reliable Vibramechequipment, with clients sleeping sound knowing that Vibramech are maintaining a constant watch on machine performance, resulting in even improved machine longevity.

Kenya is at the forefront of this development in Africa. The country is home to numerous service providers that seek to solve problems in food and agriculture using digital technologies. In 2020, the GSM Association counted 95 such services in Kenya (bit.ly/3uqWLpR). This is around twice the number found, for instance, in Nigeria, the country with the second highest digital agricultural services prevalence in Africa. Providers range from small startups to large companies that mainly offer advice,finance and market linkage.

But scaling up these solutions remains a challenge.

A study (bit.ly/3HeZaM7) on digital agriculture in subSaharan Africa showed that only a few service providers managed to register more than one million users. In Kenya, it is estimated that only 20% to 30% of farmers use a digital agricultural solution. This is better than other countries in the region—but still low.

In our research (bit.ly/3iDAHWw), we examined how to support the scaling of digital agricultural services in Kenya. We found that uptake could be increased by building digital bridges (bit.ly/3FrMro3) in the form of digital platforms that bundle such services for easy access and use. But human bridges (bit.ly/3iIfLOh) are also needed to link service users and providers. The insights from the research can help service and platform providers design and scale solutions that suit different users. They can also inform policies and investments needed to create the conditions for scaling these services.