McRaes Global was awarded the contract to upgrade the Cleaning Conveyors system to bring it inline with the recently upgraded Slasher Deck system, both of which are located in the same plant room. Like the Slasher Deck system, the Cleaning Conveyors hydraulics were suffering from rising maintenance costs, obsolete components that had reached the end of their service life, along with badly damaged and leaking pipe work.

We proposed a solution which provided a refreshed hydraulic system with modern and supportable componentry, HMI panels in both the plant and operator control stations, Pall Athalon filters were installed to maintain high levels of fluid cleanliness, filter selection was standardized with other parts of the plant to help rationalize spare part stock holding. New Hagglunds hydraulic motors (customer supplied) were installed for the conveyor drives. We also fitted crossline reliefs, and flushing facilities to each motor. The challenge was to remove the original system, and install new components in a ten day turnaround, with pre-works completed in the months prior wherever possible.

Key outcomes:

• Significantly reduced connection points due to rationalizing the original pipework and valves into combined manifolds.
• Simplification in operation of standby system.
• Updating to locally supportable components.
• Provide basic system diagnostics, and key alarms direct to the operator in real time.
• No major change to the plant control system, everything is achieved through intercepting existing signals.
• Replacement of all field pipe work to remove damaged and leaking sections of pipe.

Figure1: Original Cleaning Conveyors Hydraulic Power Unit.