For many mining and minerals processing plants, washdown, maintenance and downtime are part of everyday operations.
The real cost, however, is not only the hours spent repairing equipment or restarting a plant.
It is the production that never makes it through the plant in the first place.
Recurring spillage, blockages, wear and regular shutdowns have become so accepted that they can feel like a normal part of the operating environment.
The data on causes and cumulative impact often exists, but verifying and analysing it tends to slide down the priority list.
Gian Naldi, Senior Materials Handling Engineer at Chute Technology, states the financial argument is hard to ignore.
“The cost of downtime varies from plant to plant, but is regularly tens of thousands of dollars an hour,” he said.
According to Naldi, the numbers add up quickly, making a permanent fix for the root cause a much better proposition than constantly treating symptoms.
Chute Technology has spent more than a decade tackling difficult materials handling challenges across the mining, resources, minerals processing and ports industries.
Naldi states operations teams facing spillage or other downtime often look for quick wins, because getting conveyors and chutes running again means production resumes.
The trouble is that the relief rarely lasts.
“But if you’re not addressing the root cause of the problem, it’s just going to come back, costing more,” said Naldi.
He states that a permanent fix with a payback period frequently under one month is available, though many sites are unaware of it.
Naldi states there is never a one-size-fits-all solution, but there are three areas to examine when seeking to debottleneck material flow.
The first is the location of the belt or pulley.
Many chutes were designed decades ago for throughputs of up to 1,000 tonnes per hour (tph).
After successive plant upgrades lifted capacity to 10,000 tph or more, some sites find their chutes cannot keep up and are loading conveyors incorrectly.
Operators can spend hours tracking conveyors or adjusting skirtboards when the root cause lies elsewhere.
The second is the chute design itself, including angle, drop height, uneven conveyor loading, liner material and skirtboard wear.
Material matters too, as wet, sticky coal behaves very differently to iron ore or hard rock.
Chute Technology uses advanced simulation software to model material flow before anything is fabricated, so designs are proven before installation.
The third is the entire process rather than just the problem area.
Excess spillage or wear in one location may stem from something further upstream.
Chute Technology conducts full site audits to identify inefficiencies within transfer and materials handling systems, including issues that have developed over time or were never fully addressed.
Having completed hundreds of chute and conveyor projects across ports, surface plants and underground operations, the company has seen how quickly returns can be achieved.
At one coal mine, a new chute with self-cleaning flow surfaces cut downtime from about 700 minutes a month to just 10.
That saved 11.5 hours a month and allowed an extra 23,000 tonnes of product to move through the plant, meaning the chute was paid for in under a month.
At another site, downtime was costing $53,000 an hour, with teams shutting the plant for an eight-hour shift, a loss of over $400,000.
Over several days, the lost production could have paid for a new chute in under a week.