Your browser does not support all website features. Please use an up-to-date browser (e.g. Chrome, Edge, Firefox).

It is our great honor to cooperate with Siemens and Flender. This will help us to win big projects in the global market. Products of Siemens and Flender are of high reliability and excellent quality as well as service capacities. By this, we could realize the Roy Hill project. This must be a new milestone in the close collaboration road.

Reliable Lightweights

FLENDER gear units secure plant availability in Australia’s fourth biggest mine

Roy Mountain, Australia. Dalian Huarui Heavy Industry Group Co., Ltd (DHHI) is a Chinese technology and industry company active in a diverse range of fields. One of these is hoisting machinery. To enable it to supply the Roy Hill Mine in Australia with technical equipment as part of a large-scale project, DHHI is working in cooperation with Flender. By choosing solutions from the Flender portfolio, DHHI is benefiting from lightweight energy-efficient drives which not only offer outstanding availability but also require minimal maintenance.

The Roy Hill iron ore mine in Australia is the country’s fourth biggest mine with an annual output of around 55 million tons. The Chinese technology company Dalian Huarui Heavy Industry Group Co., Ltd (DHHI), whose fields of activity include hoisting machinery, was commissioned in 2015 to fit the mine with new technical equipment. The extremely high yield of iron ore from the mine and the scope of the transportation solutions required made this one of the biggest projects of its kind anywhere in the world. DHHI opted to bring a strong partner on board to execute the contract in the form of Flender and their portfolio, which played an instrumental role in the successful implementation of the project.

Outstanding efficiency

The conveyor systems used in the mine have to be capable of transporting around 14,400 tons of bulk cargo – substantially more than previously. To fulfill this tough remit, the main drive systems including gear units and couplings from the Flender portfolio and motors and inverters from Siemens, used in the total of seven bucket-wheel stacker-reclaimer units, the ship loader and the double cabin tippler system at Roy Hill were sourced from Siemens. The same applies to the drives for the conveyor system. Flender also supplied the engineering expertise, which includes competent assistance from the beginning, the design and engineer of drive assemblies and the aftercare operations.

The products used, part of the Flender portfolio, are specially designed for use in high-performance applications and enable energy-efficient, low-maintenance plant operation with outstanding availability. In this concrete application, the Flender bucket wheel drives provide a torque of 2,600 kilo newton meters (kNm). The relatively low intrinsic weight of the gear units means that only a similarly light counterweight is required at the other end of the boom. This simplifies the entire process of handling the equipment and also reduces its energy requirement. Reduced weight also minimizes the risk of the boom becoming deformed, which in turn increases the availability of the overall plant.

Low maintenance and a long life

High plant availability is a factor of particular importance in Australia due to the high costs of maintenance. In addition, Australia’s rigorous reliability standards mean that all machines used have to achieve 95 percent operational reliability, with the remaining five percent set aside as a maintenance reserve. The Flender solution, which is designed to achieve a service life of around 30 years, enables maintenance to be carried out during running operation. Wang Peng, Director of the DHHI Design Institute for Bulk Cargo Machinery, said: “By cooperating with Siemens and Flender, DHHI was able to win this big order.” The success of this project has paved the way for Flender and DHHI to work closely together on future cooperation projects.