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Upgrades, rebuilds and exchange

Greater water recovery, longer life – thickener and clarifier upgrades

Improve sedimentation and reduce water to tailings by up to 46% with thickener and clarifier upgrades from the OEM. We’ve poured our process and materials expertise into helping to solve mining’s water problem. The result is a series of thickener upgrades that improve environmental performance and deliver a swift ROI.

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Key benefits of thickener and clarifier upgrades and rebuilds

  • Significant reduction in water to tailings

    Customers have reduced water to tailings by up to 46% by upgrading their thickener. An Australian gold mine reduced water consumption by upgrading their thickener with E-DUC® autodilution and E-Volute™ feedwell systems. The E-Volute feedwell optimizes flocculation and aggregate growth, while the E-DUC feed dilution system minimizes flocculant use and increases settling rates. This resulted in a 50% solids (w/w) underflow density, 46% less water to tailings, and a 40% reduction in flocculant consumption (gram/tonne).

  • Swift ROI thanks to increased throughput

    Thickener and clarifier upgrades can pay for themselves in less than a year, depending on the application, thanks to increased throughput and lower operating costs. With increased water recovery and lower flocculant consumption, day-to-day costs are significantly lower. One customer’s increased water recovery saved them US$18 million per year.

  • Increase in availability with predictive maintenance

    Older thickeners, though reliable, should be assessed for rebuild every 20 years to prevent failure and downtime. A catastrophic failure, especially in tailings thickeners with no redundancy, could cause an entire plant shutdown. Our thickener and clarifier rebuild services extend the life of your equipment through timely maintenance. Regular mechanical audits are recommended to identify necessary work. Rebuilds can be completed in as little as 2 days, fitting within planned maintenance outages.

Audits & Studies 

Mechanical audits enable us to see what’s going on with your thickener and what’s required to get performance to where you want it to be. Through inspections and audits, we can pinpoint the performance gap and identify ways to bridge that gap, whether that’s through rebuilds or upgrades. If rebuilds are required, we’ll pinpoint when these need to happen to maintain optimum efficiency and availability, so you aren’t left with prolonged poor performance or downtime. 

 

Upgrading 

Thickener and clarifier upgrades come in four main categories: 

1. Feed well upgrades optimise sedimentation so you can increase water recovery. By upgrading the feed well, you can increase capacity without increasing the footprint. E-DUC® and P-DUC® upgrade packages improve underflow density and reduce flocculant usage and when coupled with the E-Volute™ feed well upgrade can have a dramatic impact on thickener performance.

2. The thickener drive upgrade increases torque measurement and improves drive reliability, increasing thickener availability and helping you avoid unplanned outages.

3. The Spiral Rake Blade upgrade package is a new rake design that helps eliminate short-circuiting in the thickener mud bed, providing a more consistent mud bed residence time and higher underflow density. The spiral rake design contributed to an 11% increase in underflow density at one customer’s site in Kazakhstan and a 15% increase in water recover.

4. Instrumentation upgrades enable you to take advantage of the latest process control and automation software to stabilise and increase water recovery from the tailings thickeners. Continuous optimisation of thickener performance also increases underflow density, reduces flocculant consumption, and improves water quality. When integrated with intelligent process dynamic simulation, it allows remote monitoring and condition prediction, so targets can be adapted to real-time conditions to improve controller performance and alert operators to current situations. One customer undertaking an instrumentation upgrade achieved a 14% reduction in water to tailings and a 15% reduction in flocculant consumption. 

 

Rebuilding 

Our rebuild services for thickeners and clarifiers includes all the key thickener components, such as the rake and rake lift mechanisms, centre column, feed well, feed pipe, dilution system, drive, power pack and bridge. Work can be carried out onsite during planned maintenance shutdowns and will take up to 5 days. Rebuilds should be considered as an insurance policy to guard against unplanned outages and form an important part of a predictive maintenance strategy.

Taking responsibility for water recovery

Water consumption is one of mining’s biggest environmental impacts, and a critical area for improvement. Thickener upgrades make it possible to increase water recovery so that mine affected water can be recirculated through the mine. The more recycled water you can use, the less raw water needs to be drawn into the plant – which has an immediate positive impact on the planet and on your bottom line.

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Frequently asked questions

FAQs for thickener upgrades and rebuilds

The factors that influence thickener performance are feed solids content, use of flocculant and how effectively they are mixed relative to the feed and settling rate of the material.

The thickener and clarifier have different ‘jobs’. The thickener works to produce the maximum solids content in the underflow, while clarifiers are designed to produce very clear liquid in the overflow.

Sedimentation can be improved through the use of flocculants and effective mixing of the flocculant in the feedwell at the targeted feedwell solids concentration.