Located in a harsh environment north of the Arctic Circle, one of the world’s largest zinc mines required a drier cake to mitigate growing transportation costs. Needing a more robust dewatering solution to meet their production goals, Evoqua’s patented high flow filter plate design was selected by the mine to produce drier cakes and reduce unplanned maintenance.
The facility operates five large Evoqua MC Press® systems to process and dewater zinc and lead concentrate. With the current market conditions for these metals, the mine’s engineers needed a solution to improve their filter press performance while providing a high level of dewatering. Cake dryness and quality are critical factors for the mine since they are located 60 miles from the port. Effective dewatering of the ore concentrate directly reduces transportation costs and benefits the mine’s profit margin.
Evoqua’s innovative high flow filter plate design leverages a greater output area resulting in the removal of filtrate at a faster rate. This improvement allows for better hydraulic throughput as bottlenecks and restrictions are reduced. Using computation fluid dynamic analysis, Evoqua engineers modeled how the high flow filter plates would outperform the mine’s current equipment. These models were used by the customer’s team to secure funding and machine time to make the equipment upgrades.
Designed to withstand the rigors of mines and applications requiring heavy duty use in incredibly harsh environments, Evoqua’s MC press sets the bar even higher for one of the water industry’s most robust pieces of equipment. To meet the mine’s unique layout and requirements, Evoqua engineers customized the high flow filter plates to the facility’s needs to ensure the best performance.
Evoqua’s high flow filter plates have a larger chamber volume which increases output 11%, from 45 metric tons per hour to 50 metric tons per hour. In addition, the high flow plates achieve better hydraulic throughput, resulting in a dryer cake and lower transportation costs. These improvements allow the customer to produce an additional $96,000 of zinc per day.
Beyond this tangible impact on production and bottom line, the mine will also benefit from extended filter plate and filter cloth life as well as less maintenance and unplanned equipment downtime. It is anticipated that the cloth life will be extended by 25% due to the improved hydraulic performance of the filter plate while reduced flow at the rejector corner will also cause less wear and tear for the cloth.
Evoqua’s high flow filter plate solution helps the zinc mine meet their business goals by increasing their production capacity and reducing their unplanned maintenance and transportation costs.
