Filtration for mining and quarrying

What is filtered, and why

The mobile fleet comes first, by a wide margin. Excavators, loaders, haul trucks and mobile crushers work continuously in a laden atmosphere: their engine intake air is the first critical consumable on the site. Insufficient filtration there is measurable in the service life of liners and turbochargers.

With them come engine oils, fuels and hydraulic circuits. On extraction machinery, hydraulics take high loads in an abrasive environment, and fluid cleanliness is directly tied to the life of valves and cylinders. This is the area where the company’s referential is richest.

Process water next: washing, screening and recirculation water, whose filtration protects pumps, nozzles and circuits.

And finally dust control, at transfer points, screens and crushers. We supply the consumables of dust collection installations; the corresponding families in our catalogue have no published sheet yet, because no technical value could be evidenced against a manufacturer’s document — we would rather publish nothing than publish a plausible range. Describe your installation and we will identify the elements.

The constraints of the environment

Mineral dust is abrasive, and that changes everything. It wears the medium by friction as much as it clogs it, which shifts the choice towards materials and surface treatments that resist mechanically rather than towards fineness alone. A very fine medium that is punctured filters nothing at all.

The load is high, often well beyond what routine sizing assumes. It calls for a generous filter area and effective cleaning, without which the pressure drop rises too quickly for the installation to last a shift.

Moisture is the second trap. A clayey or hygroscopic dust that takes up water plates onto the upstream face and stops releasing: the problem is then no longer the fineness of the medium but its surface behaviour, and the answer is often a treatment rather than a different material.

Add vibration, which fatigues frames and gaskets, and the remoteness of many sites, which makes continuity of supply a technical constraint as much as a logistical one.

What outsourcing the purchasing function changes here

An extraction site runs machines from many makes, often bought second-hand, sometimes modified. Consumable references run into the thousands, and nobody on site has the time to keep them current.

We identify what is actually fitted on each machine, look at several manufacturers for the same requirement, and follow consumption to anticipate renewals. The brands we name belong to their respective owners: we supply elements compatible with that equipment, without claiming any connection with those brands.

What to tell us

For a machine: the make, the model and if possible the serial number, plus the marking read from the element in place. For a dust collection installation: the airflow, the nature of the dust, the cleaning method and the dimensions of the elements fitted. For a hydraulic circuit: the fineness expected and the type of housing.

If the dust is combustible, say so from the outset: the question is then handled with the installation as a whole, not element by element.