BMT WBM awarded Loy Yang conveyor project
Published by Jonathan Rowland,
Editor
World Coal,
BMT Group subsidiary, BMT WBM, has been awarded a contract to design a new conveyor system for the Loy Yang coal mine in Victoria, Australia. The opencast mine supplies coal to the Loy Yang A and B power plants. The new system will be used to transport overburden from the mine to a new internal dump in a worked-out section of the mine, replacing the current system of transporting overburden to an external dump 10 km away from where the material is excavated.
The project will help the mine’s owners, AGL Energy, comply with its environmental goals through mine rehabilitation and energy saving measures.
BMT is responsible for the overall design of the conveyor system, providing the detailed design for civil, structural and mechanical elements, as well as liaising with AGL Energy’s in-house team which is delivering the electrical design.
The new conveyor system will have the capacity to transport up to 8500 tph of material on 2 m wide belts running at 5.3 m/sec. The new downhill conveyor will be approximately 1.34 km long, dropping 131 m to the mine floor using three 1000 kW variable-frequency drives, to generate power and introduce it back into the grid.
The new conveyers have been designed as a modular system with inherent flexibility to allow for unstable ground conditions and will deliver a power saving of around five megawatts over the existing system through 1 MW of regeneration and 4 MW of reduction in demand.
The project has to be delivered within tight time constraints to ensure the new infrastructure is ready to accept plant currently deployed on the external dump. The very large travelling stacker has to be moved to the floor of the mine crossing the 500 MW ‘Basslink’ cable that connects the electricity grids of Victoria and Tasmania, during an outage planned for March 2017.
“AGL Energy is pleased that BMT is supporting the delivery of environmental improvements to its Loy Yang mine,” said the a company spokesperson. “BMT’s innovative design will ensure that overburden will be moved efficiently and effectively to the new internal dump, backfilling and rehabilitating the mine as part of its day to day activities.”
Edited by Jonathan Rowland.
Read the article online at: https://www.worldcoal.com/handling/06112015/bmt-wbm-awarded-loy-yang-conveyor-project-3120/
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