Flexco elevates safe belt cleaner maintenance

Jun 09, 2023

Mine productivity is important, but safety is a non-negotiable, and Flexco strives to ensure workers are protected during repair and maintenance of belt conveyor systems.

Flexco has long been at the forefront of providing technologically advanced efficiency and safety solutions for conveyor belt systems.

Elevate, a belt cleaner monitoring system, embodies Flexco's ethos of providing real world solutions for its mining customers.

The sophisticated system enables operations to remotely gather critical data and perform real-time analysis of belt cleaner performance.

"The power of Elevate is that we don't have to have personnel undertake visual inspections of the cleaners, day-in day-out. We can make significant time savings by scheduling inspections on a weekly or fortnightly basis," Flexco Australia western regional manager Jayden Baker told Safe to Work.

Preventing unexpected downtime as a result of belt cleaner maintenance is of primary concern for operational productivity and efficiency, but remote monitoring helps to ensure a reduction in manual maintenance inspections, which in turn fundamentally improves team safety.

Elevate creates critical insights into belt cleaner performance, including proper tip and blade engagement and tension, locations of installed cleaners across an operation, blade wear, and abnormal event notification.

"A belt cleaner is one of the most important components on a conveyor system," Baker said.

"A correctly configured belt cleaner means you’ve got effective belt hygiene which ensures you don't get carry back.

"Alternatively, if the belt cleaner isn't performing properly, then excessive carry back will lead to material building up on walkways and on the conveyor structure, creating a range of safety concerns from trip hazards – as ant hills develop – to catastrophic damage where the unchecked material build-up has fallen onto vehicles and equipment located beneath a conveyor system."

The autonomous gathering of this information ensures the overall safety of personnel is significantly enhanced and alleviates the requirement for plant operators to gather data, providing them with the freedom to focus teams on other critical areas.

"Significant clean-up costs are associated with poor belt maintenance, as the manual handling required to remove built-up material remains a difficult and time-consuming process," Baker said.

Flexco enhances its belt cleaner solutions with its Universal Lightweight Pole, which is a pole cleaner designed to be up to 60 per cent lighter than equivalent steel poles.

"The Flexco Universal Lightweight Pole is made from aluminium and can be used with a safety mandrel which enables access to slide the lightweight pole out of the head chute," Baker said.

When Flexco started the development of this product six years ago, it set itself the challenge to make a 1800mm pole weighing less than 20kg to increase the safety of workers on site. This was achieved in 2019, when the company launched the 19.4kg pole to market.

A belt cleaner complete with a Universal Lightweight Pole is more than 40 per cent lighter than an equivalent belt cleaner with a standard steel pole.

"Because it's manufactured out of aluminium," Baker said.

"From a manual handling point of view, where a standard cleaner fit for 1800mm belt width weighs approximately 70kg, this cleaner is less than 40kg.

"It's fundamentally safer for workers to lift on-site, while still providing the strength and rigidity needed for high-performing belt cleaners."

The pole has been designed to suit a wide variety of Flexco primary and secondary belt cleaners, making ordering and stock piling easy for emergency shutdowns. Among the key features and benefits of the lightweight cleaner is its universal mounting plate that allows users to have one type of pole per belt width on-site, as well as the fact it has been developed and manufactured for the extreme conditions of Australian mining.

The two most common approaches to belt maintenance are reactive and proactive.

Reactive maintenance focuses on a beltline issue that needs to be fixed because it has already caused downtime or imminently threatens to do so. Proactive maintenance involves assessing the situation and taking action before a problem occurs.

While reactive maintenance is sometimes an unavoidable reality, proactive maintenance is much preferred and contributes significantly to safety, not to mention the operation's bottom line.

Flexco believes that the most efficient and effective operations embrace a philosophy of proactive maintenance.

"This approach requires operations to have a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute view of the health and performance of all equipment," Baker said. "For belt cleaners, Flexco Elevate provides this view".

Prior to Elevate, labour was monopolised performing manual inspections. This meant valuable time was spent walking the conveyor lines to examine belts and, perhaps most concerningly, worker safety was potentially compromised as they squeezed into confined spaces to inspect equipment.

"Allowing operations to better evaluate belt conveyor health anytime, anywhere without dispatching a crew to the physical belt location is a significant advancement in how operations are run," Baker said.

Many operations are embracing technology solutions in safety protocols because they can proactively contribute to best practices while increasing operational efficiencies.

The combination of Flexco Elevate and the Universal Lightweight Pole is at the forefront of this shift, allowing operations to remotely gather critical data before dispatching a crew and reducing the risk of manual handling injuries when maintenance is required.

The benefits of the Universal Lightweight Pole and Elevate technology demonstrate Flexco's desire to continually position itself as a leader in providing sophisticated customer solutions that increase safety.