Adroit chosen to implement scada on Botswana copper mine Greenfield.
As a result of previous successes and similar projects, the Mowana copper mine team chose South African-based, scada and solution provider, Adroit Technologies to implement a control system on their new Greenfield plant to ensure that the plant would be equipped with the newest technologies and developments from Adroit. The total automation solution was awarded to Adroit systems integration partner Logichem, but due to time and resource constraints Logichem chose to partner with Adroit’s Technical Services team to build the scada solution whilst they focused on the PLC and field electrical components.
African Copper-owned Mowana Mine was constructed and developed in 24 months and commenced mining in January 2008 and commercial concentrate production in October 2008. Mowana is targeting 2300 tones of copper in concentrate production for 2008. Mowana is located close to Botswana’s second largest city, Francistown, in the north-eastern part of the country, in an area which has been mined for the past 400 years.
The control system was implemented on the primary, secondary and tertiary crushing plants to ensure optimised productivity where the copper is extracted. The flotation process is then monitored using standard flotation process technology and has been designed to produce saleable copper concentrates from the treatment of approximately 1 million tones per annum of oxide, supergene and sulphide ores.
The process plant has two flotation circuits. Sulphide minerals are separated first, and tailings from the sulphide roughers are sent to an oxide circuit. Most other mineral species are recovered in the oxide flotation process. Concentrates are filtered to recover excess process water, as are tailings. Tailings will be dry stacked. Water recovered in the dewatering stages will be recycled to the various parts of the plant as process water. The final product is then packaged and distributed to smelters.
Tailored system design
The scada control system was custom designed for the plant to ensure that the demands and objectives of the mine were met. This was also a good opportunity for Adroit to implement the latest product on the plant to ensure optimised productivity. The Botswana team chose the South African-based scada provider because of its previous successes with other similar projects in the area. The team believed the technology implemented was user friendly and the software offered more promise for the new plant than did competitors. Another factor was Adroit’s ability to communicate to the network switches and the PLCs. In addition comprehensive communications and diagnostics screens where developed to assist maintenance personnel.
Commissioning and testing
A redundant architecture using Adroit’s proven Active Clustering was chosen to ensure 24/7 Agent Server uptime. The transition times provided by the Adroit Active Cluster technology was reliable and withstood even the most rigorous testing.
The operators could now make use of the trending and visual indicators to determine the health of the plant as the reports were generated manually. The implementation of the software was done fast and effectively as the operators and the Adroit team used the trending reports to make the necessary adjustments to ensure the optimal running of the plant. Rigorous FAT testing ensured commissioning of the plant was kept to a minimum and the Adroit and Logichem partnership worked extremely well delivering the project on time.
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