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The Cradle to Grave life-cycle of a mill liner
“Cradle to Grave” is defined by Wikipedia as a term used in a life-cycle analysis to describe the entire life of material or product up to the point of disposal. It also refers to a system that handles life from creation to end of life.
How do we at Multotec Rubber apply cradle to grave in our business and how do we ensure we maintain this?
We do this through our design, manufacturing and disposal after use in the mining processing environment.
Our point of departure is understanding our customer’s need, “what is their pain point”? Once that is understood, we apply various design techniques in an effort to provide a solution to our customer. Usually, they already have an existing mill but want to improve throughput. Throughput is how many tonnes more they can process on a daily or monthly basis. Through our involvement they can improve their productivity.
One of the techniques in our design capabilities is to simulate the future conditions. This helps us to project the desired improvements, thus providing the desired solution to our clients. Once the future conditions have been defined, we then decide what kind of materials combination would help us, not only to improve the life of their mill but also achieve the improved throughput. This is where we recommend pure rubber liners or a combination of steel and rubber.
Having delivered the design, we then monitor the performance of the mill using Multotec’s Hawkeye technology. This allows us to estimate, together with customer, the extent to which our predicted life would be achieved based on our simulation.
Monitoring is done through our field service team which visits clients continuously during short term shutdowns. These shutdowns offer us an opportunity to measure and analyse what is happening inside the mill. When their liner life diminishes, we find improved solutions prior to the liners being removed, after they have done their job. As their lifespan is over, our field service team is offered the opportunity to remove these and the iteration point from the beginning starts all over, thus achieving cradle to grave maintenance efficiently.