Iron ore rail un-loading system in Guinea
To design and build a hydraulic system that would be part of a train unloading system.
Products:
ISC system a combination of a hydraulic control system
Our Brief:
To design and build a hydraulic system that would be part of a train unloading system. It had to be simple and robust as it was in Guinea in a remote location and it would be used 24/7. Previous suppliers of the hydraulic systems had problems with ingress of contaminant as iron ore is very dusty product that easily blocks air cooling systems that are used to maintain oil temperature of the hydraulic system. This is further compounded by high ambient temperatures.
Each 40 tonne train wagon had to be located in a fixed position, clamped, rotated through 180 degrees which emptied the content of the wagon on to a conveyor belt, rotated back through 180 degrees, de-clamped and moved to make way for the next wagon. All had to be done in 90 seconds. An average train has 167 wagons
What we did:
With our expertise on providing sealed hydraulic systems such that outside contaminants are almost completely prevented from entering in to the system we applied this knowledge and made it a sealed unit.
We realised that removing the air blast oil cooling system would be a huge benefit and we noted all previous systems provided for this application had carbon steel oil reservoirs and they had a significant surface area. If we could use a material for the reservoir that would dissipate the heat in the oil better than carbon steel, then we may be able to remove the air blast cooling. Following detailed research in to heat dissipation of different materials and the surface area we had to work with we found that in theory making the reservoirs in aluminium would allow us to remove the oil cooling system. The tanks were built we carried out extensive in factory tests to prove to the customer and ourselves the theory was correct. All proved to be correct. We added a small fan just as a precaution to give some air flow over the oil reservoir as we could not fully simulate site conditions
The systems were installed at site and the oil temperature was monitored. The system did not overheat once and it maintained an operating temperature of 47 degrees C