Continental offers rugged and manageable conveyor technologies for mining operations

By Mary Gannon | October 21, 2024

At MinExpo last month, Continental’s ContiTech division was highlighting its latest conveyor technologies, with a focus on rugged, repairable and manageable lines.

The highlight in the booth was its Phoenix Phoenocord ST10000 belt, considered the world’s strongest belt rating. Phoenix Phoenocord steel-reinforced conveyor belts are made for the harshest applications, delivering extreme durability and reliable performance with high-capacity and high-breaking strength, making it the perfect belt for above and below ground use.

According to Brett Hall, Director, North and Latin America Regions, Service Segment, Conveying Solutions at Continental ContiTech, the ST10000 belt is used to convey copper in Chile. Continental both manufactures and installs this 72-in. wide conveyor belt, which involves a whole other level of engineering to make sure it is installed safely and with the highest quality.

A cutaway of Continental’s ST10000 conveyor belt, the strongest belt in the world.

Hall then demonstrated some of Continental’s smart technologies, including its Conti+2.0 app-based service platform. The technology provides advanced options to manage conveyor systems from anywhere and increases efficiency and profitability of an operation across all components and processes. Conti+2.0 is available in four modules to better fit customers’ operational needs. The basic module provides quick access to all master data, and an inspection module allows detailed inspection reports to be generated. An IoT module bundles both static and dynamic data on one centralized platform, and an engineering module provides support as early as the plant design stage. Supplemented by additional functions, with a new structure and a modern design with an even more user-friendly interface, Conti+ 2.0 provides smart support for customers and distributors.

“We have really invested and we’re innovating a lot of the smart technologies around conveyor belts,” Hall said. “Essentially, when we install the belt, we have monitoring systems. We’ll put sensors in this bottom cover, which tell the customer how the belt is performing. It’ll say, what are these cables doing? Are any of the cables broken? Are they starting to deteriorate in any way?

A look at Continental’s smart maintenance technologies, including its Conti+ 2.0 app-based service platform.

“It also protects against catastrophic rip. You can imagine this belt is a significant investment, so the customer wants to protect their investment. If something gets stuck in the belt and starts to rip it, they want to know about it immediately and shut the system down right before it completely destroys the belt.”

Hall said that this technology has been developed over the past 20 years, but Continental has been innovating, developing, fine tuning, and making it even better and more robust. “What we’ve done most recently is we’ve taken all of that information and provide it to the customer in a way that’s really easy to understand,” Hall explained. “Instead of sending zeros and ones and all this data where you need a PhD to decipher what’s going on, we have software that converts this information into something that’s very easy to understand.”

For example, Continental’s conveyor belts are wearable products — they can tolerate some damage that won’t affect the belt’s overall performance but this software prevent catastrophic damage. It allows you to set alerts to tell you what’s going on with the belt in a web-based program viewable from anywhere.

Conti+ 2.0 allows for predictive reliability as well. “How do you predict what’s going to happen next month and next year? Mining companies don’t want to have unscheduled downtime. They want to be able to plan when they want to repair and maintain all their products. They’re looking at their total mine,” Hall continued. “Conti+ 2.0 is a way for us to even look at the other components of the conveyor, and to be able to get more into reliability and predictive replacement.”

Continentals’ new Conti Repair program allows for quick fixes of minor conveyor nicks and cuts.

In addition to predictive maintenance, Continental now offers a new repair line. Conti Repair is a urethane-based repair material. “It’s very easy to use. Obviously, you don’t want to have to take the belt down for longer than you need to. What this does is allows us, as a service provider or the operator to make repairs in the belt,” Hall said. “If you have a small nick or cut, you can cut out a piece of rubber, including the damaged area. You fill that area in with a preparation material that makes everything adhere and stick well. Then you put in the urethane and buff it down. This is a quick fix repair of conveyor belt damage so you can run the machine until you make a full repair during a total shutdown.”

The final new conveyor product on display was its new pulley lagging material. This product provides the right amount of traction to help the pulley move the belt. “We offer cold bonded lagging now and will have hot vulcanized and cold bond pulley lagging in January 2025,” Hall said. “You need to have the right coefficient of friction between your driven pulley to make sure there is only the slip needed.”

A demo wheel showed the many material options Continental offers, such as a full ceramic or less ceramic for lighter duty belts, rubber, and polyurethane for non-driven belts with long life spans.

For more information, visit continental-industry.com.