South African construction materials producer
Ground Breakers is using UK-based CDE’s Combo all-in-one wet processing and
water recycling system to enhance the quality of its products, while lowering
operating costs and ensuring greater return on investment.
The Combo has been in use at Ground Breaker’s
quarry in Lindley, Gauteng, for a few months, and has already garnered positive
results, and serves as a successful case study for other suppliers to emulate.
At a site visit to the quarry on 1 August, Ground
Breakers owner Johan Meintjes emphasised
that far from the company wanting to have the monopoly on the product in South
Africa, it was encouraging other suppliers to also pursue such technology, as
it would raise the quality of construction materials available to the market.
CDE already has three Combo plants in the country.
Ground Breakers began producing construction
materials at the Lindley quarry in November 2016 using a bucket wheel to
transform the quarry’s raw feed of decomposed granite into construction sand
and aggregates. The Combo is an upgrade of this system. Ground Breakers sought
to replace the bucket and wheel to counteract the loss of valuable materials to
ponds and excess moisture in the final products.
The quarry site had limited water sources and space
to put up a proper wash plant. Moreover, any silt dams took away valuable
mining area.
Ground Breakers also lost a lot of fines to the
settling ponds, wasting material that it could not sell without dredging the
ponds and reprocessing it through the bucket wheel.
After considering the site’s footprint and Ground
Breakers’ requirements, CDE presented the Combo as the ideal solution.
Combo has a capacity range of 50 t to 500 t and
boasts a modular design to combine feeding, grading, washing, water recycling
and stockpiling onto one compact chassis.
The Combo allows Ground Breakers to produce two
high-quality sands simultaneously from the raw feed, including plaster sand and
river sand, for a much faster ROI.
Previously, Ground Breakers had been producing only
one sand product, therefore, the technology has also expanded its product
offering, Meintjes indicated.
The Combo’s high-frequency dewatering screen
dewaters the material in one pass, removing the need for re-processing and
double handling.
Once the sand slurry with the silt material is
discharged from the hydrocyclones, it is delivered to the screen, which is
sized according to the customers’ specific capacity requirements.
This enables Ground Breakers to provide a product
above the two sand types mentioned earlier.
The Combo has advanced water management which
ensures that the final products are dewatered to an average 12% moisture,
making them ready for market straight from the belts.
As an added benefit, the fully integrated CDE
AquaCycle thickener allows for up to 90% of the process water to be recycled
directly into the system for near independence from freshwater supplies.
The more advanced Combo technology addresses the
shortcomings of the bucket and wheel system, such as the difficulty to control
the volumes of water required for accurate material classification, owing to
the limited capacity at the feed point.
It will also engender considerable cost savings for
Ground Breakers, as generally, it sells per tonne.
Her Majesty’s Trade Commissioner for Africa at the
UK Department for International Trade Emma Wade-Smith, OBE lauded the partnership between Ground
Breakers and CDE.
She noted that it was encouraging to see CDE
expanding its footprint into Africa and supporting producers with innovative
technologies.
Tthis would allow South African producers to be aligned with the latest technologies – even if the construction industry was not ideal at present, it would have quality products once demand picked up, would be ready to serve capacity, and moreover, could export products to other countries where there was demand. https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/uk-sand-washing-technology-used-to-great-effect-in-south-africa-2019-08-02
