Wollongong bulk solids addressing mining infrastructure

According to Associate Professor Peter Wypych, the University’s foremost bulk solids academic and consultant, he and his team are increasingly looking at bulk handling problems affecting miners across their infrastructure, from the pit along transport corridors onto the port. This includes consideration of problems like dust emissions.

 

Beside his role at the School of Mechanical, Materials and Mechatronic Engineering, Wypych is also director, Centre for Bulk Solids & Particulate Technologies and general manager, Bulk Materials Engineering Australia.

 

Simulation modelling of complex bulk material properties and processes will be undertaken at the SMART facility, with two new laboratories to be opened later in the year.

 

“Mining products are becoming more difficult to handle as we do more below-watertable mining,” said Wypych. “We are dealing more and more with wet and sticky ores and also with new product streams involving magnetites.”

 

Some of the new product streams are causing problems for stacking and reclaiming equipment.

 

“Some of these (new) materials can really pack pretty hard and they are a lot heavier. You’ll find people start asking a lot of questions: can we get the rates that this thing is rated at? Will we have to downgrade the capacity of these large pieces of equipment to keep the thing running? It is also the ongoing wear issues that can be quite different.”

 

Recently, Wypych and colleagues per-formed full-scale trials on a magnetite concentrate at a fledgling WA iron ore producer.

 

“The client insisted on full scale trials so we actually simulated bulk materials under all conditions on the mine site and then we did full scale trials to unload rotary dump wagons,” he said.

 

“It’s a serious thing (for miners) where they are committing to long term contracts and making sure their infrastructure works. There is big uncertainty with a lot of this these days, with these complex products coming through and not being able to know beforehand how these things are going to perform from an engineering design perspective.

 

“We need to develop tools that can help us predict these sorts of operations –particularly the capacities of equipment –hand in hand with that all the environmental emissions stuff so that we make sure that when these products do dry out at some stage that we don’t then have a problem with dust.”

 

In terms of dust research, Wollongong has received an Australian Research Council grant for a project with DuPont. The latter is one of the foremost suppliers of dust veneering chemicals to the mining industry.

 

Wypych emphasised that he is taking a holistic approach to dust issues. “We are tackling that issue on a unified front, looking at all the key issues that need to be addressed holistically whereas in the past people looked at wet ability or evaporation rates on their own. We look at agglomeration and flow ability as a form of sustainable development –you have to look at the social impacts of what you are doing,” he said.

 

This means that the potential of dust suppressing chemicals to leach into the watertable must be considered, as well as whether chemicals are biodegradeable.

 

“Things cannot be done in isolation because you might solve one problem but create many others,” said Wypych.

 

The arrival of the SMART facility at Wollongong sits well with Wypych’s ambitions in the broader mining infrastructure space.

 

“We started looking at emission issues and the sticky ore problem 10 years ago, but it’s well aligned with SMART and slots in quite nicely,” he said.

 

Bulk solids researchers at the University of Wollongong will address mining infrastructure issues in two new laboratories at the SMART facility. One will be a Product and Handling Infrastructure lab, the other a Resources Infrastructure Simulation Research Hub, both of which are being built.

 

Staff, meanwhile, have already occupied a Flow Property Characterisation lab at the SMART facility. “There, we will continue our mainstream bulk materials activities like pneumatic conveying and general bin design and all the stockpile stuff that we have always done,” concluded Wypych.