Chute Liners

ROM Bins & Dump Pockets

These applications take significant impacts from ROM material dropping at great heights.

Typical Problems

Liner cracking
Localised high wear zones
Material hang-up when rock boxes are used
Significant downtime to reline
Hard to inspect and monitor
No online monitoring to predict remaining life of liners and allow for optimised designs based on changing wear patterns of individual liners over their life
High risk working environment including confined space, working at heights, hot work and manual handling

Makuri Solutions

Makuri technology has chosen to specialise in this are as such we can address all these issues covering Design, Materials, Mounting and Monitoring and are all covered within the Makuri Intelligent Design™ process.

Fully optimised chutes allow us to guarantee a lower TCO and provide greater sustainability to our industry.

We understand process plant front end bulk material flow better than most. Contact us to see how we can optimise your process plant front end to improve overall plant throughput, maximise asset utilisation and lower carbon footprint.

Feed / Transfer / Discharge

All process plants have a large range of chute designs, sizes and applications with most having no redundancy. Poor initial design along with ongoing process tpoh improvements leads to blockages and increased liner wear rates with associated high costs and downtime.

Typical Problems

Belt speed and material flow increases are not matched with larger chute volumetric capacity and design changes for different trajectories
Plant throughput increase results in higher wear rates and then thicker low-grade liner materials to try to keep liner life at required shutdown intervals. The cumulative effects of this reduce the open area which increases material velocity and in turn further increase wear rates along with increasing risks of blockage
What is best for each application between rock boxes and high flow curved chute designs is typically not addressed in the process improvement evaluation stage
Rapid localised wear on a few liners only can break through the chute causing spillage and safety issues
Liner failure can cut belts and damage SAG mill lifters
The life of the bulk of the liners do not match major shutdown schedules, leading to partial replacements and patch work repairs
No online monitoring to predict remaining life of liners and allow for optimised designs based on changing wear patterns of individual liners over their life
High risk working environment including confined space, working at heights, hot work and manual handling

Makuri Solutions

Fully optimised chutes allow us to guarantee a lower TCO and provide greater sustainability to our industry.

SAG Mill Feed Chutes

The SAG mill is the most critical part of any process plant. Don’t risk losing operating time and tpoh by ignoring the feed chute!

Typical Problems

Plant throughput increase results in higher wear rates and then thicker low-grade liner materials to try to keep liner life at required shutdown intervals. The cumulative effects of this reduce the open area which increases material velocity and in turn further increase wear rates along with increasing risks of blockage
The effects of high velocity or contraflow water addition into the ore path and the resultant turbulent ﬂow cause wear paths that can rapidly and unpredictably wear out the chute
Poor trajectory from conveyor to chute results in high localised wear
Blockages increase from poor chute design and overly thick liners
Rapid localised wear on a few liners only can require a full chute change
Feed chute liner life does not match SAG mill reline frequency
No online monitoring to predict remaining life of liners and allow for optimised designs based on changing wear patterns of individual liners over their life
These issues in SAG mill feed chutes are responsible for excessive planned and unplanned downtime and lost production

Makuri Solutions

The SAG mill is the ‘cash register’ of most mining operations & if it’s not turning, you’re not earning! Despite the critical nature of this part of the plant, the chute that feeds it is often neglected. Makuri is one of the few suppliers worldwide that focuses on SAG mill feed chute design and is able to optimise these by modelling wear, particle and fluid flows using a range of advanced techniques that are incorporated into our Makuri proprietary Intelligent Design™ processes.

SAG feed chutes and their liners fully optimised by us allows us to guarantee a lower TCO and provide greater sustainability to our industry

Reclaim Chute Liners

These remain unseen during normal plant operations and are also not seen as priorities for plant optimisation as ownership issues between maintenance, metallurgy and operations can often cause this to become an unowned and poorly managed area.

Typical Problems

Significant production losses are incurred every time the stock pile is lowered raised again to allow for liner inspection and replacement. This frequency must be extended as much as possible under planned conditions with highly reliable and long-life liners
The inaccessible and largely unknown nature of reclaim chute liner condition prevents normal maintenance planning based on condition but rather based around SAG mill relines but with large safety margins required to prevent unplanned events
If chute liners fail and get into the feed damage to conveyor belts and mill liners can occur with serious associated production losses
Excessive clearance between the static lower liners and the moving pans allowing material to excessively wear the lower edges of these liners and often progress thru to the outside of the feeder
Each reclaim feeder liner set has its own wear life and patterns based on operating time and feeder speed and are constantly changing
No online monitoring to predict remaining life of liners and allow for optimised designs based on changing wear patterns of individual liners over their life
High risk working environment including confined space, working at heights, hot work, manual handling and direct exposure to the environment

Makuri Solutions

Long life liners, faster & safer relines and online monitoring

Fully optimised reclaim chutes allows us to guarantee a lower TCO and provide greater sustainability to our industry.

We understand reclaim feeder chute operational and wear related issues better than most. Contact us to see how we can optimise your process plant front end to improve overall plant throughput, maximise asset utilisation and lower carbon footprint.

Feed Cone Liners

A largely misunderstood feed and liner system that significantly effects crusher tpoh, psd and cost / tonne.

Typical Problems

Feed cone life does not match liner life, resulting in additional shutdowns
Poor feeder chute design creates poor material flow into the feed cone and creates non-centralised feed to the crushing chamber making it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and maintain choke feeding conditions
Commodity wear materials based on Q&T / AR Plate make up the majority of liners used these applications due to price alone.
Basic commodity type liners in the lower feed cone wear fast and unevenly
Uneven wear on feed cone liners results in shifts of the feed centre over time often resulting in adjustment ring bouncing
Wear on the feed cone liners is often not measured or easily seen and can result in wearing thru into the feed hopper with significant unplanned downtime to correct
All the above has significant effects on not only the crushed product performance of the crusher but also significantly reduces liner and parts life.

Makuri Solutions

Makuri can design and supply purpose-built feed assemblies fitted with long life custom Feed Cone Liners using what we call the Makuri Intelligent Design™ process. This results in integrated solutions that are longer life and allow for best crusher performance

Fully optimised feed cones and liner systems allow us to guarantee a lower TCO and provide greater sustainability to our industry

We understand process plant front end bulk material flow and wear better than most. Contact us to see how we can optimise your process plant front end to improve overall plant throughput, maximise asset utilisation and lower carbon footprint.

Rock Box, Bund & Lip Liners

Many chutes upper edges, transition and discharge points require edge protection to do a variety of functions from protecting the edges, forming rock boxes and also ensuring the material is streamed properly.

Typical Problems

Lack of off the shelf solutions that easily adapt to many applications
Often reuse of old worn mill liners is done for lack of better material and mounting options
The use of many small commodity “Chocky Blocks” is also common but time consuming and costly
Most current solutions are only weld-in or bolt-in
These types of liners can wear fast but are hard to access and change
Rapid wear on liners will also change the material flow paths through the chutes over time with unseen and unknown effects on downstream liners and processes
Wear on any such edge liners is not easily measured or seen and failure can also have negative impacts on downstream processes