Gigantic Powers: Industrial Gear Units For Large Open-cast Mining Equipment

Fourth period, first subgroup. The chemical element with atomic number 29 was known as “ore from the island of Cyprus” (“aes cyprium”). The ancient Latins called it cuprum, from which the symbol Cu is derived. We are talking about the semi-precious metal copper, which is used as a conductor of electricity and heat in the electrical and electronics industry. Its demand from industry tends to increase. The price of this raw material fluctuates, but has regularly been above USD 6,000 per ton in recent years. Therefore, the yield of copper ore is worthwhile, and with increasing raw material prices even reprocessing of overburden. Copper is also an integral part of our private lives: roofs, cookware, coins, cell phones, computers, toners - they all contain copper or components made from this material.

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The world's largest copper deposits are found in Chile and Peru, the United States and Canada, Russia and Mongolia. The state-owned Chilean copper mining group Codelco is the world's largest copper producer with 64,000 employees. It controls about half of Chilean copper reserves - that is one fifth of the world's reserves. The Corporación Nacional del Cobre de Chile operates seven mines, including the Radomiro Tomic open-cast mine. It is located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, the driest region in the world, and has been in operation since 1997. After almost two decades, parts of the equipment had to be replaced. For this reason, Codelco placed an order to build a special large excavator with the Magdeburg company FAM in early 2015. It is always in demand when it comes to systems in very large dimensions.

Plant engineering with tradition

Magdeburger Förderanlagen und Baumaschinen GmbH is an international company with a long history in plant engineering going back to the 19th century. Today it is one of the largest employers in the state capital of Saxony-Anhalt. There is decades of experience in heavy machinery and plant engineering. FAM is primarily active in the areas of bulk material handling - in particular mining - and service. The latter includes the reconstruction of old devices, maintenance contracts for mining companies and the spare parts business. Other business areas are processing technology and contract manufacturing. The company can currently refer to reference systems in almost 80 countries. With a wide range of large devices and individual machines such as bucket wheel excavators, belt systems, spreaders, scratchers and mixed bed devices,FAM supplies paddle wheel reloaders as well as crushers and mills to the function-determining “heart” of conveyor systems for opencast mines and power plants, metallurgy, the building materials industry and other industries.

Elaborate copper extraction

Copper ore is removed with mobile devices, broken, pretreated and transported to a storage location. This so-called leach pad is built line by line. It is typically about 3 to 12 m high and 200 to 500 m wide. On this heap, the copper is leached out of the ore ("leached") and later used for electrolysis. The result is high-purity copper in the form of rectangular plates. Since the extractable copper content in the ore is only about 1%, the production process has to move about 100 times the material.

To extract the leached ore, a reloader drives along caterpillars and removes the material line by line in parallel mode. At the end of the heap, the mining device must be moved across its caterpillars. To reach the correct position, a curve maneuver is carried out. In contrast to excavators, there is no slewing gear. Therefore, when dismantling the material, the area of ​​the disc height and depth of cut should be as large as possible in order to enable a low driving speed and thus efficient operation. The throughput is the product of area and speed. Because the reloaders travel relatively slowly at approx. 5 to 12 m / min nominal driving speed, the buckets must be very long. They allow a large depth of cut.

Content of the article:

• Page 1: Gigantic Powers: Industrial Gears for Large Open-Pit Mining Equipment
• Page 2: Big as a house
• Page 3: Logistical challenge

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