Kwatani, a leading OEM producing customised vibrating equipment, has supplied five mill discharge screens to support a leading gold mining operation in Namibia
Kim Schoepflin, CEO of Kwatani, said, “The mine is gearing up to increase its production by 50%, to take advantage of the strong gold price. Our role was to ensure that our discharge screens meet their exact process requirements – with our efficiencies of up to 95% – while delivering mechanical integrity for minimal maintenance downtime.”
The mine expansion includes the installation of two mills – a high-pressure grinding roll (HPGR) and a vertical mill – which will boost production while reducing energy demand. Kwatani’s mill discharge screens, each measuring 3 m wide by 8 m long, will handle the coarse and fine material from the HPGR and the vertical mill. The company will also supply three silo feeders to feed material from the silo to conveyors.
The coarse screens were designed at a decline, and feature a larger screening media aperture with higher amplitude and stroke. Together with lower speed, this achieves better screening efficiency for the coarser particles. The fine horizontal screens, with smaller aperture screening media for the finer feed, were designed with a higher speed and lower amplitude and stroke.
Schoepflin also highlighted the attention paid to the isolation of the vibrating screens. In this case, Kwatani engineers selected rubber buffers, which have higher dynamic loads but are more suited to wet applications and screens with a heavier mass.
For these five screens, Kwatani designed and supplied custom counter-balance frames to minimise the dynamic load to the plant infrastructure.
