Coal Age Magazine - For more than 100 years, Coal Age has been the magazine that readers can trust for guidance and insight on this important industry.
Issue link: https://coal.epubxp.com/i/1032065
September 2018 www.coalage.com 33 drive systems continued SANIK THE MECHANICS OF MINING MORE INTRODUCING THE MB670-1 BO ER MINER The new Sandvik MB670-1 bolter miner is the latest in a range of proven, productive and reliable bolter miners from Sandvik. Purpose-built for longwall mining, and offering dozens of improvements, this new bolter miner can improve productivity by up to 30% and drive down your total cost of ownership by up to 20%. Learn more about the MB670-1 and the mechanics of mining more. Test results are to be considered as results reached under certain and controlled test conditions. These teat results should not be treated as specifications and Sandvik does not guarantee, warrant or represent the outcome of test results in any or all circumstances. ROCKTECHNOLOG-SANDVIK 7 24 - 246 - 2 9 0 1 ployed for testing. A gold major promptly inquired about the system as a potential solution for two parallel primary crushers that historically had issues with shutdowns. The adoption of Voith's SlipSet and the CMS 310 proved to be the remedy. "The new system, which allows more slips, is more in- telligent," Westberg said. "The short-torque spike can be dampened, and it can limit the torque during the torque spikes without disconnecting the whole machine." With the CMS 310, the miner "can choose whenever they want to see how much it slips," Westberg said, "and they can choose to reset it during a normal maintenance stop." In January, the system was operational. "In February, we received the first history log to see that they had two slippages without release, which with the old system would have caused two shutdowns," Westberg said. That means the system "saved them two or three hours uptime," he said. "We're talking about $50,000 to $100,000 per hour." That illustrates the value of the sys- tem, Kyle Kluttz, vice president, new busi- ness sales, Americas, Voith, said. "One of the benefits to the customer is they have a record of events that affect the crusher drive," he said. With it, "they can see de- tails of torque overloads in the crusher." With the previous setup, the user would have known only that a release oc- curred. "They don't know what led up to that: Were there high-torque events over a long period of time or was it instanta- neous?" Kluttz said. "And now they have the data behind their crusher drive per- formance, as we've seen with the data log from the field test," he said. "It gives them more intelligence on how their system is performing and allows the user to adapt their operations to mitigate downtime." The miner was "very pleased with the reduced number of resets and the in- creased uptime," Westberg said. The CMS 310 is set for launch at bauma 2019. Being the Step Change One of the hallmarks of success with any innovation is its adoption by one of the ti- tans in the sector. That is what is set to happen to Hor- ton's RCV2000 Fully Variable Fan Drive, ac- cording to Manish Virmani, vice president, global market development. "I think we are on the cusp of that," Virmani said. "We expect it to become the standard solution in the industry in the years to come." The latest addition to a burgeoning fam- ily of drives, the RCV series was conceived in 2013, announced in the fourth quarter of 2016 and launched in early 2017. Received well, it has been in validation testing by a major global mining equipment manufac- turer for much of the first half of 2018. Such an outcome might have ap- peared inevitable as the solution, promot- ed by the company as a simple retrofit that afterward pays for itself rapidly and re- quires little maintenance, saw widespread adoption upon release. "There have been in many installations around the world: Australia, Mexico, Canada, U.S., Belarus," Virmani said. "A lot of mines have been running it, testing it." The drive is described as a fan-speed control device. Installed between the engine and the fan, the stand-alone closed-loop system leverages sensors and a controller to detect and measure subtle fluctuations