Control Techniques' drive secures production at gold mine
October 2010
Motion Control & Drives
The Simmer and Jack Buffelsfontein mine in the North West Province needed to reactivate a tailings disposal system that had been decommissioned.
The system, at the very end of the process, is responsible for pumping some 300 cubic metres per hour of slurry into the tailings dam. Any interruption in slurry pumping has a knock-on effect up the line, quickly halting the production of gold. An obsolete variable speed drive, reliability and spares proved to be insurmountable problems, until a fast turn-around, close variable-speed control and bypass solution was proposed by Control Techniques Southern Africa.
The 220 kW drive solution chosen was a Unidrive SPM AC drive comprising four modules, complete with input and output chokes, a door-mounted CTIU touch-screen control panel and a direct-on-line bypass system with main circuit-breaker, contactor and motor overload protection. Control Techniques designed and built the panel and supplied the control logic that allows the pump to be started either from the panel or from the remote control room. Flow meters measure the upstream flow of the slurry and these, in turn, feed into the process control system that regulates the speed set-point for the drive. The ability to control pump speed to match needs produces considerable energy-saving on such a big pump. In the event of drive failure or maintenance work, the customer can manually select the bypass system to ensure that pumping of the tailings, and hence gold production, continues uninterrupted.
The units that make up the Unidrive SPM range can be used to implement most types of system. The separation of the power circuit into rectifier and drive stages enables elegant and compact active input configurations to be implemented. The modular nature of the power circuit allows drive systems to be constructed in non-standard enclosures. The range is part of the Unidrive SP ‘solutions platform’ AC variable speed drive range that spans 0,75 kW up to 1,9 MW. It is configurable in five operating modes: open and closed loop; vector; servo and regenerative. A wide range of feedback, networking and programming functions can be added with plug-in modules
Control without complexity
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