Increased liner wear life keeps the Mexican copper mining giant’s crushers up and running.
Replacing the liners of a primary gyratory crusher is a time-consuming undertaking for any mine. The less frequently this task has to be performed, the better. Eliminating just one concave segment change-out every year not only adds several days of precious production time, it also reduces maintenance costs and risk exposure. It’s a win-win scenario for everyone involved.
The best way to eliminate liner change-outs and extend maintenance intervals is by using wear parts that are optimized for the application and are longer lasting. This is exactly what Buenavista del Cobre set out to do when it chose to rely on Metso to provide optimized wear parts for its primary crushers.
Located in Cananea in the northernmost part of Sonora, Mexico, Buenavista del Cobre is one of the world’s largest copper mines. Of the mine’s six Metso Superior™ MKIII 60-89 primary gyratory crushers, Metso supplies liners to the four of them located in the concentrator II and Quebalixes plants. When the plant was put in operation in 2015, the crushers were running with standard manganese liners, which lasted for approximately 40 million tons. Since then, Metso has been optimizing the design and the material of the liners.
“Metso has given us a big hand in increasing the wear life of our equipment. Currently, the concave segments last for about 100 million tons, which is equivalent to 13 thousand operating hours. Being able to change the concaves every two years makes a big difference,” says Engineer Jorge Alberto Vázquez Villela, Crushing Maintenance Chief at Buenavista del Cobre.
The advantage of the longer wear life is the increased uptime and production.
“The longer wear life means that we don’t have to stop the equipment just to change a liner. It helps us keep the equipment available so that there’s more production and less downtime,” Vázquez Villela explains.
Read the entire article on metso.com: More production and less downtime with optimized primary crusher liners at Buenavista del Cobre.
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