coal

When people talk about coal, many people immediately think about heat and energy. But in our field - the production of mining equipment - this word means primarily abrasiveness, load, wear. A common mistake for beginners is to underestimate exactly how different types of coal, from brown to anthracite, affect the service life of machines. It seems like a ladle is a ladle in Africa too. But no.

Where theory meets reality

In textbooks they write about the strength of the rock and the loosening coefficient. In practice, when an excavator or loader works in a coal mine, the main enemy is dust. Fine, penetrating everywhere. It doesn't just pollute, it acts as an abrasive that kills hydraulics and bearings in a matter of months if the filtration system is not up to par.

I remember at one of the Siberian open-pit mines there were constant complaints about the frequent failure of pumps on loaders. The equipment manufacturer made a mistake on the quality of the hydraulic fluid. And when they opened it, all the filters were clogged not just with dust, but with specific coal fines with a high content of quartz. It turned out that the geological layer was like this. We had to review the entire system of air and liquid filters and install multi-stage cleaning.

This is about the question of why there are no universal solutions. Equipment for Kuzbass and for a mine in the Krasnoyarsk Territory may require different settings and protective solutions, even if seemingly the same stone is being minedcoal.

Magnetic separation: an invisible but critical stage

This is exactly the area where our companyLONGI Corporation, has accumulated serious experience. After crushing coal, it is important to separate the rock, and often random metal objects (pieces of support, tools) that can get into the mass. The use of electromagnetic separators is not a whim, but a necessity for the quality of the product and the safety of further transportation along conveyors.

On the websitehttps://www.ljmagnet.ruYou can see that we focus on mineral processing equipment. This is no coincidence. For the coal industry, magnetic separation solves two key problems: increasing the purity of coal (reducing ash content) and protecting crushing and grinding equipment from metal.

There was a case at one processing plant: the teeth on a roller crusher constantly failed. They installed stronger alloys and it didn’t help for long. Only after installing an above-conveyor suspended separator with a strong magnetic field did it become clear that fragments of hidden reinforced support from old workings were regularly found in the coal. The separator caught them, emergency stops were reduced significantly.

LONGI: from drawing to section

Company?Shenyang Scientific Electromagnetic Co., Ltd. LONGJI?, created back in 1993, has gone from developing individual components to complex solutions. When an enterprise with a total area of ​​140,000 m2 and a team of more than 1,200 people talks about the production of mining equipment, this implies deep engineering study.

What does this mean in practice? For example, when designing a separator for wet coal preparation, it is necessary to take into account not only magnetic parameters, but also the corrosive aggressiveness of the pulp, its density, and particle size. More than 60% of employees with higher education is not just a number from the description. These are process engineers, metallurgists, and designers who can adapt a standard model to the specific conditions of the customer.

The annual volume of 4,000 units of equipment is a scale that allows successful solutions to be developed and replicated. But, importantly, it does not lead to stereotyped thinking. Each new coal seam is a slightly new challenge.

Economy under pressure: cost of downtime

Any mining manager knows that downtime of an excavator or processing line is a direct loss. Therefore, equipment reliability is not an abstract word, but rather specific hours between failures. The choice of technology or auxiliary systems, such as magnetic separators, often depends on this calculation.

Sometimes they try to save money on 'non-essential' equipment. Why, they say, an expensive magnetic separator if you can install a simple grid? And then this 'scrap metal', passed through the grate, ends up in an expensive mill. Repairs, line stoppage, underfulfillment of the shipment plancoal— the total amount of losses exceeds the cost of a good separator several times.

Our engineers, when visiting sites, often carry out such an educational program with an economic justification. It doesn’t always work out the first time, but when you show the dynamics of downtime before and after installing a protection system on a graph, the arguments become stronger.

Looking forward: not only to extract, but also to clean

Nowadays, more and more attention is paid to environmental friendliness and deep processing of coal. This creates new hardware requirements. It is necessary not only to extract and separate the rock, but also to prepare coal for further use as efficiently as possible, be it coking or modern gasification technologies.

Here again the purity of the product comes to the fore. And magnetic separation, which makes it possible to remove even the smallest impurities containing iron, becomes a critical link in the technological chain. This is no longer just equipment protection, but a direct contribution to the quality and price of the final product.

Working withcoalnever stands still. Production technologies are changing, environmental standards are becoming stricter, and efficiency requirements are increasing. And the equipment must keep up with these changes. Experience similar to that accumulated inLONGI Corporationover decades, is valuable precisely because of its understanding of these dynamics. It is important not just to sell the car, but to fit it into the lively, complex and often messy process of turning a rock into a useful resource. This, perhaps, is the whole point.