Modern Quarrying Q3 2019

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A Pfreundt WK60-S load weighing system supplied by JBI Industrial Solutions has helped a silica mine improve its production planning and loadout processes

With the Pfreundt system, quarry managers can know how much material is being moved – this saves time, lowers costs and improves operations.

The system allows for dynamic weighing while loading. It is also precise, fast and accurate within +/- 1%

The system comes with interfaces for printers, network (LAN), CAN-Bus, power supply, as well as radio data transmission via WLAN, GPRS and GPS positioning

The system is connected to the Pfreundt web portal.

Having seen massive operational gains, the operation is planning to have a second system installed on its second front-end loader used to feed material into the processing plant

The problem “We had a problem with our load- out processes on site. We would either underload or overload trucks, and this would only be discovered at the weighbridge. Obviously the truck would need to come back to load the correct ton- nage. This resulted in unnecessary downtime, high costs in the rehan- dling of material and wastage,” explains the plant manager at the silica mine. Christiaan Luttig, marketing director at JBI Industrial Solutions, says the supplier started working with silica mine in February this year. He explains that because the sand producer deals with high-qual- ity material, when every truck is loaded, it has to go through quality control where a physical sample has to be taken. If the sample passes, the truck can then proceed to the weighbridge. The process takes a bit of time. After going through quality check and it is discovered that the truck is overloaded, for example, it would

KEY ADVANTAGES OF THE SYSTEM

Maximum accessibility to the operational data via internet

Individual evaluation functions

Software as a Service – no software installation, no updates, no internal maintenance necessary

High level of flexibility – modifiable according to customer desires

need to return to the stockpile. “A big problem here was that in case of over- loading, the truck could neither just add more material nor dump the mate- rial on the stockpile because, given the high-quality nature of the material, there could be high chances of cross contamination. The material would be dumped on the waste pile, where it was then refed into the processing plant for rewashing. In essence, the silica mine was losing in excess of 34 t of material on every truck overload,” explains Luttig.

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QUARTER 3 - 2019 MODERN QUARRYING