New life for old crushers

Upgrading equipment instead of replacing it helps companies to continue producing at the lowest cost per ton, enabling higher throughput and less wear.

Pilot Crushtec together with Metso Outotec recently delivered and installed a world-first upgrade to older Metso Outotec mobile crushing equipment. Existing belt feeders on a Lokotrack LT300HP mobile cone crusher were upgraded with TK feeders.

“In doing this we created an opportunity to breathe new life into older machines in a way never done before in the industry,” says Pilot Crushtec sales manager Charl Marais. Migrating to the new feeder option on the cone crushers assists in maximising productivity, increasing throughput and reducing costs per tonne for several of Pilot Crushtec’s mining and aggregate producing customers, he adds.

The Lokotrack LT300HP is recognised as an efficient and flexible mobile cone crusher for secondary and tertiary stage crushing, and has always been available with either of the two feeder options. The TK feeder includes the advantage of a vibrating pan feeder with a grizzly. Local customers have historically opted for the belt feeder, largely owing to the lower upfront capital cost of this option.

The company explains that a belt fed cone crusher comes with a feed hopper at the back of the machine. Material from an excavator feed is received and directed onto the belt conveyor, which then carries the material to the cone crushing chamber.

With a belt feeder, the cone crusher is fed with a high proportion of fine material. This adds to the load in the crushing chamber but does not contribute to the high value output that the crusher produces. In contrast, the vibrating feeder and grizzly bars in the TK feeder are designed to allow the fine material in the feed to bypass the crusher and go straight to the stockpile or further in the process.

“Bypassing the fines and only crushing material that needs to be crushed increases your throughput,” says Marais. “A cone crusher is a volumetric machine by nature, and by taking out fines, you create more crushing volume in the chamber. For instance, if you bypass 20% of fines in your feed material, your production rate will increase by 20%.”

Additional benefits of the TK feeder include reduced wear and lower cost per tonne of material produced. Limiting the amount of fine material that reports to the crushing chamber increases the life of wear items, particularly crusher liners, and also reduces the machine’s power usage as the cone crusher’s closed side settings are maintained.