The Milpillas mine, part of Grupo Peñoles, is an underground copper mine in Sonora, Mexico. Production started in 2006, and currently, the mine produces more than 20,000 tons of copper per year.
Safety is a top priority for Grupo Peñoles, and one way to increase it is to minimize the amount of time spent on maintenance. Wear parts that require less frequent change-outs play a key role. As an added benefit, equipment availability is higher, while the cost per produced ton of copper is lower.
Milpillas has collaborated with Metso to develop the wear parts of their underground Primary Gyratory Crusher as well as their surface screening process.
Increasing concave segment lifetime from 6 months to 2 years
“The starting point was that we had frequent, long maintenance stops which affected the availability of the primary crusher,” says Iván Rangel, Maintenance Assessor at Milpillas.
The optimization that Metso provided involved switching to a different alloy and changing the design. The wear life increased to 4 times the original.
“With these new concave segments, we have increased the crusher’s availability, and hence the processing and crushing of material in our processes. By moving from stops every six months to once every two years with the new concaves, our production costs have gone down considerably,” Iván Rangel explains.
Read the entire article and watch a video of the development on metso.com: Wear part development increases safety and uptime at the Milpillas copper mine in Mexico.
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