CONVEYING
DYNAMIC ENGINEERING GEARED AT PRODUCTIVITY, SAFETY For many quarrying – and indeed materials handling – operations, conveyors are vital to the efficient and timely delivery of aggregates. As Neil Kinder and Cameron Portelli explain, the right selection of conveyor components and products can make all the difference for profitability and productivity.
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n many industrialised nations, the mining and resources sector boom fuelled by investments from governments and private companies into major roads and infrastructure works can have a positive economic flow-on effect for various industrial sectors. Profitability is often viewed as one of the primary drivers for these initial and continued project investments. This itself can potentially lead to the inherent problems of cost-cutting and the planning/utilisation of lower cost inferior plant and equipment equivalents at implementation stages. Today’s bulk materials handling operators and processing plants are under pressure to maximise profitability and meet continuous productivity targets. Likewise, and quite often, mechanical conveyor problems can start off very minor and, without proper diagnosis and resolution, potentially result in serious OHS hazards and conveyor structural compromises. The problems of wasted product, noise, material spillage and environmental dust disturbances quickly become familiar on-site realities. For many materials handling operations, the conveyor system is central to its long-term profitability and viability. Increasing demands for mining, aggregates and other resources 16
Quarry May 2020
lies heavily on the effective and continuous conveying of bulk materials products at each stage of the industrial process. Without this in place, productivity becomes compromised, resulting in frequent, unplanned and often costly downtime. Most operators can relate to the past experiences of productivity downtime and unscheduled maintenance. With the benefit of hindsight these on-site productivity, efficiency and safety issues can be eliminated or at best minimised through the sourcing and utilisation of engineered and high performance conveyor plant and equipment and correctly optimised engineered planning and design.
BUYER BEWARE Today’s global economy means when sourcing conveyor plant and equipment, operators are spoilt for choice – there is a vast array of conveyor component suppliers and access to highly engineered and latest innovative solutions to advance end to end handling processes. For most operators, price alone is often the motivator for purchase. However, buyer beware, lower price products are more often “copycat” and “knock-offs”, offering low par standards and functionality benefits to the original product.
The reality of inferior, lower price copycats is the untold costly, irreversible damage these products can have to the conveyor structure, to conveyor belts and the unscheduled maintenance and productivity downtime to replace these inferior products – only to be discovered shortly after the installation hurdle. When considering cost-cutting on a corporate level, many plant and equipment suppliers are also challenged by the dilemmas of large corporate purchasing department heads who are ignorant to the engineering differences between genuine and counterfeit products. They quite often make their purchasing decisions based solely on price, often at the expense of quality. The issues of cheaper “knock-offs” and counterfeiting continue to dominate today’s fashion, electrical and other consumer goods. Further, the rise of “copycat” products have found their way to industrial conveyor components, eg bearings, rollers, anti-wear liners and skirting materials just to name few.
TRUSTED QUALITY Take a closer look – just because it looks the same doesn’t mean it is exactly the same. Lower cost polyurethane skirting and antiwear lining products, on the surface, may
