Filtration saves Costs and Increases Production
Diesel fuel is one of the largest single operational costs to any open-pit mining operation. Fuel on a mining site is stored (Bulk tanks, bowsers), used (Plant, equipment) or misused (Wastage, leakages, theft). The quality of the diesel being used contributes significantly towards ensuring, or improving, the usage efficiency and effectiveness. With mines using up to 20 million litres/month, inferior quality diesel can easily translate into losses of millions due to underperforming and out-of-service equipment. Key contributors to lesser quality diesel are suspended water and particles.
Water removal, particularly suspended water, is becoming ever more crucial to ensuring that advanced-tier engines and equipment operate optimally. Even the smallest amount of water turns into steam inside injectors and causes underperformance, damage and mechanical failures. In many regions in Africa this is a decidedly serious problem.
“In simple terms the solution is dedicated filtration,” says Deon Mostert, Business Development Manager at Ressource Solutions. “Mechanical failures frequently occur and typical on-board fuel filters do not handle high levels of impurities very well. To prevent early plugging and repeated change-outs of filters, fuel quality should be ensured throughout the entire fuel supply chain. Ideally, ensuring diesel fuel quality should be an operation-wide exercise, from delivery, through storage, to dispensing,” continues Mostert.
Ressource Solutions offers a wide range of proprietary filtration products under the iCerMax™ brand. The range will address any site’s entire diesel filtration blueprint, solving even the most challenging contamination scenarios in remote locations all over Africa . The more contaminated the fuel and the larger the fuel volumes, at high flow rates, the higher the surety of sustainable cleanliness levels that are attained.
The iCerMax™ range includes dispensing (Receiving and transfer), tank cleaning, kidney filtration, mobile trailer and on-board filtration solutions and caters for minor kerbside filtration across the filtration spectrum up to bulk mining dispensing applications of 500+ litres per minute systems.
“Our filtration solutions are manual or fully automated, modular, customisable and engineered to eliminate site failures, at a low cost per litre, and ensure that no OEM warranty issues occur due to contaminated fuel. Consequently many of our mining clients benefit from improved efficiency, production, durability, equipment life-span and less breakdowns,” concludes Mostert.
Ressource Solutions has made it their purpose to develop world-class hydrocarbon management systems that are both cost-effective and user-friendly. As an OEM Ressource Solutions markets its unique fuel management solutions under the PetroMan® brand, providing meticulous, real-time, measuring and reporting that allows clients to intricately control hydrocarbon quality and usage. Ressource Solutions continually develops and implements robust and up-to-date hardware and software platforms and has supplied FMS solutions to the mining sector, across Africa, since the 1990s.
For world-class asset optimization solutions visit our web site www.ressource.mu
