eDART valves and process samplers enhance efficiency at Booysendal plant
December 2017, News
eDART dual valves and poppet samplers continue to offer exceptional level control at Northam’s Booysendal plant near Lydenburg, Mpumalanga.
eDART Slurry Valves director, Richard Rule commented: “When Booysendal was originally built in 2010, we supplied dual dart valves and poppet samplers, and continue to be involved in the commissioning and after-sales support to Booysendal, which has sourced additional samplers from us over the years. Our dart valves have kept the level error to less than 2,5% over an eight hour period at this plant. This is an important achievement as level control is vital in order to maintain the required grade of the concentrate.
“External dart valves were initially chosen for flotation level control to concentrate the metal from ore, and the plant currently has 27 flotation machines each fitted with a dual dart valve. It can be argued that this is the most important valve on a concentrator as it is the last controlling element that determines if the metal reports to the concentrator or is lost to the tails.”
“Booysendal has commented that our dart valves offer the best level control ever experienced on the plant. We do not just sell our product and walk away. We offer a considered assessment of valve requirements to our customers, and throughout the first year of operation, after our original installation at Booysendal, we assisted in the optimisation and fine tuning of the plant to ensure that the best possible performance was obtained from our valves.”
Driven by the need for improved efficiency and throughput, good concentrators continually evolve. Samplers play an important and useful role in the monitoring system required to direct this evolution. “The Booysendal plant in particular has been very proactive in using our samplers and analysis to improve their processes,” said Rule. “I believe eDART’s technology played a role in Northam’s improved results due to its superior quality.”
Brian Whitehead, plant superintendent technical at Booysendal added: “Through the proper sizing of valves, we have been able to increase our feed rate to the plant without any major control issues on the valves”.
Together with Afrivalve, part of the eDART Group, eDART were responsible for servicing and maintenance of equipment at the Booysendal plant which included all the calibration and servicing of valves to maintain optimised operational efficiency. Other control loop elements also had to be correctly selected, calibrated and tuned in order to ensure peak plant performance.
For more information contact Richard Rule, eDART Slurry Valves, +27 (0)11 823 6620, richardr@edart.co.za, www.edart.co.za
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