Professional Articles

Belt Conveying

Belting the Worlds’ Longest Single Flight Conventional Overland Belt Conveyor

The state of the art conveyor CV1103 at Wesfarmers North Curragh mine incorporates many innovative energy saving features, such as intelligent, multi-speed VF drives, low rolling resistance pulley cover rubber, large idler rolls and wide idler spacing. Chute designs are high efficiency and include a unique variable geometry design at the mid station drive to minimize dust and belt wear. The paper describes design and selection procedures for the custom designed belt with ultra low rolling resistance pulley cover, excellent crack resistance and proven aging resistance. Final cost benefits of 41% operating cost and 39% capital cost were achieved as a result of this state of the art design.

Introduction

The worlds longest, and possibly the world’s most sophisticated conventional conveyor is located about 21 km north west of Blackwater and 200 km west of Rockhampton. It runs for 20.3 km transporting coal from the new Curragh North open pit mine to a unique 5-way distribution point near the Preparation Plant. Owned and operated by Wesfarmers Curragh Pty Limited this overland conveyor was a joint venture design partnership between Laing O‘Rourke, Australia (LOR) and Conveyor Dynamics, Inc., USA (CDI). LOR was the turn-key design, construct, supply and commissioning contractor, CDI was the technology provider to LOR for major equipment specifications, dynamic analysis, control analysis and its integrated system design, advanced chute flow technology, and critical rubber compound parameters in association with Veyance Technologies, (Goodyear Engineered Products), to minimize rolling resistance.
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