Innovative hammer samplers ensure accurate results

Ensuring accurate sampling is critical in the mining industry and advances in sampling techniques are helping to ensure increased sample reliability.

Multotec’s innovative hammer samplers allow two consecutive samples to be taken from the product stream in quick succession, ensuring two sets of accurate results – one for the mine and one for the customer.

“A single sample increment cannot simply be divided into roughly two equal parts. This can result in up to five of the nine sampling errors occurring in a single step,” explains Multotec senior application engineer Refilwe Makgae, emphasising that each consecutive increment must instead be carefully diverted to its own bin, so that successive increments do not contaminate each other. The company highlights that is has developed a reliable flopper gate that is easy to operate and gives feedback about the flopper positioning.

“This ensures that a good seal is achieved, preventing sample cross-contamination,” says Makgae. “For existing operations where this new requirement is imposed, this innovation can be easily retrofitted.”

She notes that high levels of precision in sampling can only be achieved with fine design tolerances for each application. For this purpose, Multotec has developed software integration models across AutoCAD Inventor and programming code, to automate parts of the design. This process uses pre-programmed design logic and interpolates from the company’s data library which covers a worldwide footprint of over 800 hammer samplers in the field.