Symons crusher’s upgrade increased its availability by 31%

Metso | September 25, 2019 | 3:26 pm Suppliers & Equipment 
Installing the upgraded symons crusher at Codelco’s Division Andina. Image by Metso.

Maintaining high equipment availability rates is crucial for any mine. For this reason, Codelco’s Division Andina, one of the most important mining sites in the region, needed to perform a crusher upgrade to their Symons crusher.

In order to achieve the needed increase in availability, the equipment’s setting time was reduced, as were its bowl removal time and its adjustment ring removal time. These various upgrades have reduced maintenance times and, with it, injury risk – and have led to increased uptime.

Upgrading crushers for higher uptime

Mining production rates have risen over the last few years, so it is necessary to maintain high equipment availability rates. In order to meet this challenge, it became important to upgrade the site’s crushers.

Division Andina, Codelco’s mining site in the mountain range of the Valparaiso Region, 80 km from Santiago, needed to increase its coefficient of performance in its tertiary and quaternary plants. Given this situation, there were two options: purchase new equipment or update the existing units.

The Symons 7’ crushers working at the client’s mining site belonged to the older generation of these machines, that is, machines installed prior to the 1980s. The main factors that affected the coefficient of performance of the mine’s ageing Symons 7’ crushers were:

  • Stalling (mineral, iron, wood, etc., caught in its crushing chamber) and the fact that the units had to go into maintenance for long periods of time without warning; these issues ultimately led to lower production.
  • The time associated with operational adjustments to the equipment, such as its close setting, which had to be carried out at least twice every shift. This generated complications due to its older configuration, which involved a piston rack and, for each adjustment made, caused a 30-minute interruption (on average) to the process. This interruption added up to 2 hours of lost time a day (corresponding to 8.3%).
  • Today, after the upgrades were carried out, they are still adjusted twice per shift, but the daily impact is only 20 minutes a day, i.e. an increase of 7% in the equipment’s usage.
  • The third factor was the scheduled maintenance every 4,500 hours; it was time-consuming due to the fact that these older-generation Symons 7’ units have an outdated spring system that doesn’t allow for quick maintenance and the ready freeing of the crushing chamber.

This problem is common to all mining plants with older-generation equipment. In Chile, there are more than 100 such units operating in different mining plants.

Read the whole article: Availability increased by 31% with an upgrade to Symons crusher

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