Designing and manufacturing apron feeders

Apron feeders are an essential component of the mineral processing cycle. After decades of maintaining, fixing and installing them, Minprovise has also begun designing and manufacturing them.

As a specialist maintenance services, products and engineering company, Minprovise provides expert support to the mining, construction, oil and gas and infrastructure industries across Australia.

The company operates in key industry locations in Perth, Karratha and Port Hedland in Western Australia, and Coopers Plains in Queensland.

Minprovise offers everything from mineral processing equipment and fabrication to specialist industry products and site services.

General manager of business development John Minnaar told Australian Mining that, in the mining sector, Minprovise predominantly provides maintenance services, especially in the crushing and material-handling environment.

"Part of that is also the supply of technical specialists or subject-matter experts to maintain and optimise the equipment," he said.

"We provide parts and services as well as products to support the mining industry, and we assist clients to evaluate the condition of their assets to help plan and schedule maintenance."

Minprovise was established in 2004 with a core business of reducing the risk associated with operation and maintenance of crushing equipment.

The company occasionally delved into refurbishing apron feeders, though it wasn't a focus.

But in 2017 an opportunity presented itself for Minprovise to follow apron feeders down a more permanent path.

"That's when we decided to set up an apron feeder division and an apron feeder specialist service that I headed in 2017," Minprovise apron feeders and materials handling technical specialist Louw Scholtz told Australian Mining.

"We’ve grown from refurbishing one apron feeder a year to eleven machines this last year across the board."

When this apron feeder specialist service was implemented, the company's technical experts provided maintenance on any brand its customers had installed on-site.

Minprovise gained a lot of experience and knowledge, getting to know apron feeders inside and out – literally.

The specialist team managed to demonstrate the value of manufacturing Minprovise's own brand of apron feeder based on the knowledge and experience accumulated through years of providing maintenance to other brands.

Minprovise has been able to take the best design elements from each model it encountered in the field, improve on them, and incorporate the results into its own well-oiled machine.

"An apron feeder is a fairly simple piece of equipment, but our team has done a lot of innovating and research and development of safety items that we’ve designed and incorporated into our maintenance strategies and taken into account for the design of our machines," Minnaar said.

"We were able to find out the good and bad points of all the machines out there are and bring the best of it together into our product."

It almost goes without saying that Minprovise has an array of technical experience. Scholtz's team is out in the field continuously working on, improving, and maintaining apron feeders.

Added to the team is Minprovise's drawing office manager and apron feeder design and development leader Darren Brooke, who has years of experience for various market competitors.

All together, Minprovise has the A-Team of apron feeder design, maintenance and optimisation.

"We believe we’ve got a very strong technical team who take into consideration the lifecycle of apron feeders, from the design through to operation and maintenance," Minnaar said.

Apron feeders usually have a lifespan of four to five years before replacement.

Minprovise has now developed a unique process and methodology for this replacement.

This process works in partnership with the client's own standards and procedures, as well as their needs based on the data Minprovise has collected during the previous four to five years of maintenance.

Standards change and new ones are continually introduced; it's a dynamic space.

"In a lot of the plants, these machines were designed before certain standards even existed," Scholtz said.

"So we go out and assess the site for specific ways to improve that particular set-up and come up with ideas and designs to enable easier and more efficient maintenance.

"This can include building specialised platforms and devices that we can hook winches and access platforms onto or build the platforms around the machine to carry out maintenance."

This site-specific analysis, combined with Minprovise's more general database gleaned from years in the maintenance space, results in a comprehensive approach with unique and often subtle changes and adaptations.

These can have significant impact on overall efficiency and optimisation of the circuit and, more specifically, apron feeders.

Scholtz and Minnaar agree that many of the difficulties or challenges Minprovise has come up against have forced the company to think outside the box and come up with unique ideas, designs and safety features that mitigate some of the risks generally present in this environment.

Minprovise remains consistent with its beginnings of ‘reducing the risks’ but, as the company's entrance into the design and manufacture of apron feeders is showing, it takes its current positioning of ‘forward-thinking partners’ very seriously.

Part of this transition and growth has been an internal overhaul in which Minprovise invested heavily in training so the revised teams are able to improve on their knowledge development of innovative solutions.

"We have very competent people that go into the field, assess and bring the information back to us in-house, where we combine it with our greater knowledge and experience and the client's needs and come up with innovative solutions" Minnaar said.

"The open field of development is a continuously ongoing process. "We have our base designs and we use our subject-matter experts to invest the knowledge back into our designs."

Minprovise values collaboration and feedback and as a company it gets involved in community activities, supporting local in all aspects of the business – manufacturing, assembly, maintenance support and operation – as much as it can throughout its home state of Western Australia.

The experienced team at Minprovise will continue to improve safety and identify efficiencies in processes where possible, staying committed to reducing costs and risks, and minimising downtime.

It really is the A-team of apron feeders.

This feature appeared in the February issue of Australian Mining.