The horizontal curve and downhill section of the 8,9 km conveyor.

The head-end transfer station of the final 1,4 km section.

A belt-turnover point.

A typical road crossing.

The final transfer station feeding the stockyard.

A section of the 8,9 km-long conveyor with its vertical and horizontal curves.

 
The 13,4 km overland conveyor system supplied to Middelburg Mine Services has now been in operation for several months, is working according to specification and has already carried in excess of 7,5 million tonnes of coal. The installation was part of phase II of Ingwe Coal Corporation Limited's R480M Coal Resources Utilisation Project (CRU II).

The system conveys 1 800 t/h of coal from the new reserve at Klipfontein to the existing north section coal-processing facility at Hartebeestfontein. It traverses reclaimed land, still to-be-mined land, farmland, a national road and a mine haulage road, several rivers and a flood plain.

Three conveyors make up the system. Two are straight conveyors 3,1 and 1,4 km long, with belt widths of 1200mm and 1 050 mm respectively. The third, which utilizes electronic variable speed drives, being an 8,9 km conveyor with a belt width of 1 050 mm, has both horizontal and vertical curves along its length. The river and flood-plain crossings required a 980 m long gantry section supported on steel trestles with concrete footings on piled foundations. The roads were crossed using self-draining tunnels.

The designs of the two straight conveyors differ. The longer one utilises the steelwork, the 1 200 mm belting and idlers reclaimed from the defunct Majuba Mines 6 m overland conveyor, supplied by BATEMAN as a turnkey project in 1990.

The new system as supplied by BATEMAN under a lump-sum turnkey contract which covered the project management, route selection and survey, geo-technical investigation, conveyor design including dynamic analysis, supply, erection and final commissioning. BATEMAN on the contract in competition with several top ranking world contenders.

More information n the overland conveyor may be obtained from Eric Fletcher, Marketing Manager, at +27-1-345-5000 or email bulk@batemanengineering.com

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