Category: Blog

High-pressure grinding rolls, or industrial grinding wheels, are becoming more and more universally expected in mining applications. Thanks to their hydraulic system that can exert varying levels of pressure, they effectively produce large amounts of fine material—including separating diamonds from softer minerals without crushing larger stones. People continuously choose high-pressure grinding rolls thanks to their efficiency, reduced downtime, and long wear life.

Learn more about the life expectancy of an industrial grinding wheel and how it can benefit your mill production.

Technology Improvements

Typically, the life expectancy of an industrial grinding roll ranges from one year to eighteen months. Initially, the industry was hesitant to switch from SAG to industrial grinding roles. After engineers adapted the grinding rolls to become homogenous with the needs of the hard rock mining sector, ore manufacturers began seeing their inherent benefits.

Engineers incorporated studs onto the rolls to make them last longer. This addition also creates an autogenous layer. Maintenance downtime was reduced by using open-frame designs as opposed to traditional box designs. The open-frame design has allowed users to do tire changes in less than 24 hours annually.

Advantages of HPGR

Industrial grinding wheels have a compression that produces micro-cracks in the minerals being processed, reducing downstream milling capacity while increasing mineral recovery. Here are more advantages of using high-pressure grinding rolls in your mill:

• HPGR consume less energy than other crushing technology. Force is applied in several directions, resulting in finer particles and creating more product at size with only one pass.
• Less leaching acid is needed, and percolation periods are reduced
• HPGR can be a selective grinder protecting minerals from surrounding softer material
• The indirect grinding reduces wear and tear on the roll

Industrial grinding roles can improve your mill production’s efficiency due to reduced downtime, less energy usage, and selective grinding. To learn more about the advantages of high-pressure grinding rolls, contact Cast Steel Products.

The crushers in your material processing operation provide a vital and intense job: milling and refining ore and rock. They need regular maintenance to remain reliable and produce quality materials. Regular maintenance of a crusher gives your plant more uptime and equipment with a longer life expectancy.

Learn more about the importance of regularly maintaining crushers as well as keeping your screen and conveyor maintained.

Crusher Maintenance

Rock crushers use steel crushing chambers, and these chambers need to be replaced every so often. But other maintenance priorities shouldn’t be overlooked on cone or jaw crushers. For example, oil and filters need to be changed daily. Other wear parts also need to be checked frequently for wear and tear. They are:

• Blow bars
• Shoes and anvils
• Wear plates

Liner changes should happen when you begin to experience a ten percent decline in production. Be sure not to wait too long for liner replacements to avoid excessive downtimes.

Screen Maintenance

Screening maintenance and replacement is also a priority as it undergoes intense vibration to separate larger and smaller aggregates for further milling. The timeline for screen replacement varies depending on the type of screening panels your plant uses. To increase the life span of the screen, be sure it’s adequately supported and has the recommended amount of tension. Machine oil changes are also vital, as well as daily cleaning to prevent the accumulation of stone and dust that could damage the screens.

Even though screen replacement will result in some downtime, following the equipment manufacturer’s instructions on replacement frequency will help ensure you don’t damage any support frames or hardware.

Conveyor Maintenance

Conveyor maintenance is essential to keep the belts in working order. Belts only need to be changed out if damage occurs. Some issues can be corrected with belt adjustments, but belts and return rolls need to be kept clean to avoid build-up that can cause damage. Belt scrapers will also help to remove buildup and other debris.

The importance of regularly maintain crushers cannot be overstated— neglecting care results in excessive downtime and high costs. Learn more about replacing crusher liners with Cast Steel Products to reduce your plant’s downtimes.

Within communition circuits, High-Pressure Grinding Rolls (HPGR) are increasingly replacing traditional milling conventions such as (S)AG or rod and ball mills for hard rock reduction. This is, in part, due to their substantially lower energy consumption and potential for the high cost of ownership reduction. Not only do they require up to 40 percent less energy than traditional milling methods, but their wearable components last much longer than those in rod and ball mills. The downtime required to replace worn parts on an HPGR is much lower than replacing mill liners. In this guide, we will look at HPGR performance in comparison to traditional milling.

Advantages of Inter-Particle Reduction

Rod and ball mills expend a majority of their energy on the coarser particulate within the feed. The finer particulate moves into the interstitial gaps between the media rather than receive the full brunt of the impact. As a result, ball mills produce a more comprehensive array of particulate sizes, requiring additional work downstream. In comparison, the inter-particle compression in an HPGR has a more even effect on the entire feed, resulting in a high ratio of fines with a broad particle size distribution.

Inter-particle compression is achieved by two counter-rotating, similar-sized rolls that synchronously work at variable speeds, forcing particles to crush one another and compressing the feed density to 80 percent of its solid volume.

Offloading (S)AG Mills Pebble Crushing via HPGR

Thanks to its intense pressure and wear-resistant rollers, HPGRs are more effective pebble crushers than conventional cone crushers. In instances where the build-up of pebbles in (S)AG mills can become a bottleneck in meeting the required plant capacity, re-crushing the pebbles is imperative. In a traditional mill, the generated pebbles are re-crushed via cone crushers. However, the hard and abrasive nature of these pebbles results in significant liner wear and frequent downtime. Integrating an HPGR into the pebble re-grinding circuit can alleviate the wear component and improve the (S)AG mill’s overall feed. With HPGR, the re-grinding of historical stockpiled pebbles becomes a viable opportunity for extracting valuable minerals from what was once considered a waste product.

Other Points of Comparison

High-Pressure Grinder Rolls have a few more advantages over conventional milling, in addition to increased reduction qualities. They occupy less physical space than most ball and rod circuits and vibrate comparatively little, thus requiring less support.

There are many HPGR manufacturers. Cast Steel Products is a leading, worldwide supplier of HPGR Roll to OEM and after-sales markets. Our experienced sales and engineering departments work closely with the end-user to determine precisely what is required to supply an innovative custom solution that’s manufactured to ISO 9000 or proprietary standards and designed to deliver. We hope this HPGR performance comparison has informed you on High-Pressure Grinding Rolls. Contact Cast Steel Products to see what they can do for your mining operation.

Mining wear parts and excavating wear parts are commonly replaced components used in mineral and aggregate extraction and processing. Heavy equipment wear parts include buckets, shovels, teeth, dragline parts, grinding mill liners, crawler shoes, links, clevises, power shovels, and wear plates. Wear parts or wear liners for draglines, power shovels, and tunneling machines are used to replace worn or damaged components in crushing machines, milling machines, grinding machines, and size reduction equipment. In this way, mining wear parts and excavating wear parts help mines operate more efficiently. Read this definitive guide to mining wear parts to learn more about these replaceable parts.

Applications

Mining wear parts and excavating parts are used to repair, maintain, and upgrade machinery and equipment such as backhoes, bucket excavators, cable shovels, continuous miners, dippers, and dozers. They can also be used on draglines, dredging machines, earthmovers, excavators, hard rock mining machines, and loaders. Mining wear parts and excavating wear parts are also used with tunneling and micro-tunneling equipment; mining equipment and strip mining equipment; shovels such as power shovels, steam shovels, and wire rope shovels; rippers, road headers, and trenchers; and track excavation machines, wall shearer loaders, and wheel loaders.

Materials

Material wear parts and excavating wear parts differ in terms of materials and features. Specialized materials for replacing wear parts include metal overlay clad, with a harder alloy or carbide layer, cast manganese steel, high-chrome cast irons, Ni-Hard, cobalt alloys, cemented carbides, hardened stainless steel, tools steels, martensitic steels, and austenitic steels. Manganese or high nickel steel can attain an austenitic structure. Work sets and transforms to a more rigid martensite layer during end-use. Impact and wear resistance are provided by combining materials such as manganese steel wear strips, carbide wear buttons, or high chrome cast iron plates bonded to a flexible steel backing.

Cast Steel Products is a leading supplier of cast, forged, and fabricated wear parts to OEM and aftermarket ground engaging and heavy equipment. We are committed to supplying innovative engineered site-specific wear parts for demanding applications in different industries.

Our experienced sales and engineering departments work closely with our different customers in mining and mineral processing, oil sands, construction, and road maintenance to determine specific end-use material requirements, manufacturing options, and design solutions. We hope this definitive guide to mining wear parts will lead you to contact Cast Steel Products for your wear part needs today.

A crusher is a machine designed to reduce large rocks into smaller rocks and gravel. A wide range of cone crusher liners are available to accommodate coarse and fine feeds, but which you choose depends on several factors. The most crucial element in cone crusher liner selection is the feed. You should have a well-graded feed going into the crushing chamber. However, you should also know what type of feed you want to put in your crusher. Read these considerations when selecting a new crusher liner to learn more.

Crush Material

Several factors affect liner life, but the most notable is the stone you process and how it’s suited for your crush liner. Rock liners are responsible for providing the immediate dynamic content on the stone as it’s being crushed. The different types of stone interact with the liner in a certain way. The type of cone crusher liner purchased needs to support the material being crushed. In both the materials, the crusher is composed and the size and wetness of the material you’ll be running.

Predictable Maintenance of Wear Parts

One menace to any job site is downtime. Time is a precious commodity that cannot be replaced. So, when you have a machine part go out unexpectedly, you’ll be wasting precious manpower as you scramble to fix the problem. Certain parts are made to wear down at predictable levels and be replaced at pre-selected times. With an easy-fitting liner, you’ll experience minimum downtime, predictable maintenance scheduling, and a speedy replacement.

Durability

You will really want to talk to your dealer about the particularities of their products, and then you’ll want to compare. A longer wear life will mean increased uptime and efficiency, as more material can be run through the liner before replacement. You’ll want to check with your manufacturer whether a custom or factory-made crusher liner is right for you. A custom-made crusher liner may offer more features that can extend its life.

Cast Steel Products is a leading supplier of crusher liners for all primary cone crushers, gyratory crushers, jaw crushers, impact crushers, and roll crushers. Our experienced sales and engineering staff work closely with you to supply exactly what is needed. Our crush liners deliver a longer wear life which means liners don’t have to be replaced as often. Fewer quantities are required per year, leading to less frequent maintenance shutdowns. We keep our customers working at peak proficiency because our crush liners were designed just for that. We hope these considerations when selecting a new crush liner have helped you consider the advantages of Cast Steel Products. Contact our experienced sales team today!