Abstract
Belt conveyors (BCs), because of their high efficiency, are widely used for bulk material handling in the mining industry. However, due to the high level of conveyors’ energy consumption, the belt conveyor systems generate a large part of mining costs. Therefore, the current solutions mostly focus on implementing new management strategies, which find energy consumption as a key indicator in designing belt conveyor systems. Belt conveyor equipment selection, conveying systems, operation, applied mining technology are considered to be areas where improvement of belt conveyors’ energy efficiency may be achieved. Moreover, they can be used to implement novel standards for BC equipment and the proposal of defining new quality standards and creating BCs’ classification has been already outlined. The main idea of the paper is to compare the values of specific energy consumption (SEC) of BCs with regard to the inclination angle of a conveyor route which results from technological needs. The multiple regression is used to find a relationship between two basic independent variables – the volume of transported material and conveyor’s inclination angle – and a dependent variable (SEC). The procedure enables to determine the value of SEC which is required for lifting the material. Presented results prove that the value of SEC required for lifting the material is crucial for the interpretation of the SEC value when it comes to energy efficiency comparison.
Highlights
The mining industry requires an enormous amount of energy for the main operational activities such as extraction, material handling and processing
Since combining these energy efficiency components together leads to sustainability, presented idea is specially dedicated to energy management activities
Taking into consideration Eq (3), Figs. 3 and 4 and above assumption, it is supposed that two independent variables: the volume of transported material and sine of conveyor’s inclination angle have a significant influence on dependent variable – specific energy consumption (SEC) value used for comparing analyzed belt conveyors
Summary
The mining industry requires an enormous amount of energy for the main operational activities such as extraction, material handling and processing. The energy efficiency is analyzed as a key indicator in designing and exploitation phase of conveyors – general definition of the problem and directions of development are presented in (Alspaugh 2004; Zhang, Xia 2011; Gładysiewicz et al 2009; Kulinowski et al 2013) Another point is that the majority of proposed solutions focuses on two levels: equipment and operational ones. In case of downhill conveyors authors in (Mathaba, Xia 2017) implemented optimal scheduling model to control conveyor belt systems to improve their energy efficiency. Cost optimal operation which leads to energy cost savings may be achieved using closed-loop Model Predictive Control approach (Luo et al 2015) Another effective way to improve belt conveyors’ energy efficiency is reducing their energy consumption by speed control. The energy optimization of belt conveyors at operational level needs to keep the balance between technical and economic constraints (Zhang, Xia 2011)
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