FLS Gyratory Crusher wear liner optimisation quadruples operating life and delivers sustainability benefits at major gold mine

Road to increased production

Initial concave liners at the gold mine were achieving throughput of 4 million tonnes until replacement or emergency repair became necessary. However, changes to operating conditions meant that this was no longer suitable. Wear life was 30% to 40% below what was required.

The mine was aiming to increase the lifetime of its concaves to 6 million tonnes and approached FLS, a leading supplier of gyratory crushers, to provide a solution.

Based on analysis of the feed material, and wear and failure analysis, the two main drivers to reach the goal were established to be finding an optimal design and technology. With this in mind, FLS got to work.

The result

The customer saw significant improvements to not only the wear life of the concaves, but also reaching unforeseen throughput levels. 

The wear life of the new MMC concaves gave 4x more wear life and 18 million tonnes, which was 3x the initial target. 

Other added benefits included reducing downtime and operational costs due to minimising the required change out and replacement concaves to meet the target. 

Another major highlight is around the newfound sustainability benefits. By being able to increase the wear life of the liners by 4x, this will mean one set of liners will do the job of what 4 sets were doing before.

This will result in less waste being produced from used liners, less raw materials being required to manufacture such liners and also reduce the carbon emissions. So FLS helped enable the customer create an overall more efficient operation at many levels.