Mining

MINING

MINING

MINING

ElectroDrives manufactures and supplies an extensive range of products for concentrator plants of an extensive range of minerals worldwide, including precious metals mines (gold, copper, platinum, silver), iron ore mines, aluminum mines, nickel mines, zinc mines, lithium mines…

The main solutions provided include:

Variable speed drives, starters and motors for grinding mills including SAG (Semi-Autogenous Grinding) mills, ball mills, etc. Grinding mills represent the largest load at the processing plant and their reliability is critical for the plant. Our solutions are fitted for single pinion and dual pinion drive. The typical sizes of our offering go from very small mills to up to 20 MW. Our extensive product portfolio allows us to offer different technologies for the drive train depending on the motor topology and gearbox selected, including:
- Fast-speed Squirrel Cage Induction Motors (SCIM) used together with the gearbox and a variable frequency drive (VFD) for starting the ball mill and starting and controlling the SAG mill speed.
- Fast-speed Wound Rotor Induction Motors (WRIM) or Slip Ring Motor used together with the gearbox, a Liquid Resistor Starter (LRS) for starting and Slip Energy Recovery Drive (SER Drive) for SAG mill speed control.
- Fast-speed Squirrel Cage Induction Motors (SCIM) with gearbox and clutch with a Solid-State Soft Starter (SSS) for starting.
- Fast-speed Synchronous Motors (SM) with gearbox and a Static Excitation Unit for starting and synchronizing.
- Low-speed Synchronous Motors (SM) without a gearbox with variable speed drives (VFD) and an external excitation unit.

Variable speed drives (VFD) and motors for slurry pumps and cyclone pumps. We offer from low voltage applications (690V) for small pumps up to medium voltage (3kV, 6kV, 11kV…) variable frequency drives (VFDs) up to 8,000kW.

Variable speed drives (VFD), liquid resistor starters (LRS) and motors for crushers, regrinding mills, vertical mills, tower mills, stirred mills, conveyors, etc. which are in general smaller than the SAG and ball mills.

Harmonic filters and capacitor banks for larger grinding mills (> 20MW) using Gearless Drives (cycloconverters) with wrap-around motors. These mills produce a very significant amount of reactive power and harmonic distortion (THD), which is necessary to filter to fulfill the power quality requirements of the grid connection.
Multi-stage harmonic filters and capacitor banks to compensate the harmonic distortion (THD) and reactive power of all non-linear loads existing in the processing plant.

Additionally to the supply of equipment for new installations or plant expansions, ElectroDrives offers a service to upgrade or refurbish existing drive trains that run at a fixed speed into variable speed drives with the minimum cost, footprint, risk and downtime. Many industrial processes which were designed based on former state of the art are not getting the benefit of a variable speed operation. This can greatly improve the process efficiency and the energy consumption. An example of the potential improvement are the SAG mills, where the variable speed drive can increase the mineral output, reduce drastically the wear of the mill liners and reduce the energy consumption.