Three hidden risks in a plant's flow system
Downtime gets blamed on the pumps and the mills. It usually starts in the flow system — in wear, in pressure nobody is measuring, and in numbers nobody has.
Unplanned downtime is usually blamed on the big machines — the pumps, the crushers, the mills. More often it starts somewhere quieter, in the flow system that feeds them.
These are the three risks we meet most often in concentrators and in infrastructure plants.
1. Wear, and the damage that accumulates
A stream carrying steel, gold, nickel or copper — and increasingly lithium and cobalt — wears pumps, valves, pipework and liners far faster than the design case allowed for.
- Unplanned downtime
- Maintenance spend that climbs year on year
- Throughput that quietly falls away
2. Pressure you cannot see
Specify the wrong pressure instrument, or put the right one in the wrong place, and the fluctuations and surges in the line stop being something anyone can catch in time.
- Damage to pipework
- Pumps running away from their duty point
- Equipment life cut short
3. Real numbers, and what they are worth
Without flow, pressure and energy measured as they happen, a decision to lift efficiency, to trim reagent consumption or to cut the energy bill is a decision taken blind.
Where we come in
Core TS Partners supplies the equipment and the engineering around it: setting the technical requirement, making the selection, then supplying, installing, commissioning and supporting. Tell us what your line runs and we will put a proposal against these three risks.
