August 2010System Integration & Control Systems Design
Two years ago Assmang decided to increase the mining and processing of manganese ore from its Nchwaning II and III mines, located at Black Rock in the Kalahari, about 80 kilometres from Kuruman. Sechaba Letaba, the senior general manager of BRMO said: “We are planning to produce more than five million tons a year eventually from our mining operations. As production ramped up at Nchwaning, we identified the existing surface beneficiation plant as a bottleneck, since it could not provide sufficient crushing, screening and washing capacity.”
Accordingly system integrator Iritron was appointed together with TWP to design, procure and manage the construction of Assmang’s Nchwaning III Beneficiation Plant. Alwyn Rautenbach, managing director of Iritron, expressed his gratitude for the continued faith: “We once again supplied a quality automation solution that is within budget, on time, easy to maintain and which meets all the operational requirements.”
The new beneficiation plant sources ore from either Nchwaning II or Nchwaning III mines, which gets placed in one of four 2500 ton silos depending on the customer/grade required. The ore is then transported via a conveyor system through a series of crushing, washing and sampling facilities and is sized and graded into bins according to customer requirements. The new beneficiation plant enables a production changeover from low to high grade ore in less than 20 minutes.
Iritron added two new 22 kV distribution stations to the existing reticulation network. The company also designed and supplied the MCCs. Quality up-front design work meant very few on-site modifications resulting in a neatly racked and cabled installation where locations are far apart due to the nature of the operations. The instrumentation design was done on Dessoft’s engineering software 1Des and based on remote I/O distribution in the field and cabled to I/O collection points in the MCCs.
Iritron’s brief was to develop an automation solution based on best practices and standards that also caters for future expansion. A cutting-edge PLC/SCADA solution was offered that leverages the latest features of Schneider Electric’s Unity Pro v4.0 collaborative engineering software and Wonderware’s ArchestrA 3.1 technology. The Wonderware System Platform (based on ArchestrA technology) was installed for the specific configuration of this project. The corresponding ArchestrA and Schneider Unity DDT templates were developed for the project and these provide the platform for standardisation, simplified coding and accelerated engineering. Wonderware’s Historian provides the required logging, trending and reporting functionality. The Information Server 4.0 Web portal allows management and other data clients to view the plant mimics remotely and keep an eye on up-to-date production reports. The reports relay real-time and accumulated production throughput and capacity utilisation on a per-shift and a daily basis. All Wonderware solutions were supplied and are being supported by Wonderware Southern Africa, an EOH company.
At the request of Black Rock, Iritron’s operations director, Andre Roeloffze, was appointed as commissioning manager for the new plant on behalf of the mine. The plant was handed over ready for production in the middle of May 2010. Congratulations to all the team members and support staff on completing the Nchwaning III New Beneficiation Plant at Black Rock so successfully.
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