Vibramech, southern Africa’s largest manufacturer of vibrating mineral processing equipment, is synonymous with quality, reliability, and robust vibrating equipment.

This proud reputation is a consequence of continuous technological innovation over four decades which has cemented its status as an OEM of dependable equipment, (which is considered to be among the harshest and most aggressive environments in the world), throughout the world.

“We engineer solutions for each client’s unique minerals processing requirements. Our current installed base of over 10 000 pieces of equipment makes us the South African leader in market share. We are proud to be the preferred supplier of vibrating equipment to project houses and mines in southern Africa,” starts David Massey, Vibramech MD.

The company supplies its equipment primarily to mining and minerals processing industries across the globe (Africa, Europe, Asia, Australasia, North and South America), and has extensive experience in gold, diamond, coal, iron ore, manganese, platinum, chrome, nickel, uranium, copper, mineral sands and aggregate operations.

“Our design practice makes use of Finite Element Analysis and Strain Gauge Analysis to prove structural integrity, with detailed attention paid to wear protection and commonality of components to minimise spare parts inventories,” Massey continues.

Vibrating equipment plays a crucial role in minerals processing, and is widely used for classification, dewatering, medium recovery, scalping, trash removal, grading and desliming. Due to this crucial role, early fault detection, diagnosis and analysis become important to continuously reduce and eliminate costly, unscheduled downtime and unexpected breakdowns.

To ensure the optimal operation of its vibrating equipment, Vibramech has launched Vibrasure – an online condition monitoring system which has enabled continuous vibration monitoring of the equipment operational parameters, such as vibration frequency, stroke, angle of the motion and temperature to detect and diagnose machine faults.

Vibrasure employs structural and bearing sensors designed with the latest technology. All sensors are IP69K rated and have long-life integral batteries that can withstand the harshest of conditions.

The system also reports key parameters to a cloud-based platform. Those values can be trended over time and provide significant benefits to optimise the performance of vibrating equipment. “This further enhances our already robust and reliable equipment and cements this business as a world-wide supplier, providing our clients with the additional comfort of knowing that any deviations in equipment performance will be picked up by our engineers via Vibrasure,” Massey outlines.

As sound dynamic behaviour is essential to ensure vibrating equipment reliability, all equipment is built to perform within strict dynamic parameters. All internal mating surfaces are machined in order to maintain stringent dimensional tolerances. In addition, the company’s quality assurance programme makes provision for a full 3D vibration analysis to be conducted on all equipment prior to release. This is used as a benchmark for the life of the equipment.

“Our equipment needs to withstand the high wear associated with the screening of abrasive ores such as chrome, platinum and iron ore. We also have a range of speciality liner materials, paint specifications and wear prevention compounds which are used to combat the effects of corrosion in the marine and refinery applications. Vibramech even offers the option to install a screen in stainless steel,” explains Massey.

The Vibramech design makes extensive use of rubber lining to reduce the effect of wear and impact on screen components. A range of steel, ceramic and polyurethane liners are available to protect screen and grizzly side plates, as well as feeder pans. An abrasion resistant / Anti-corrosion Epoxy Resin System is used to minimise wear associated with fines in wet applications.

“It is imperative that stresses induced by welding are minimised to prevent crack formation in vibrating equipment,” Massey says. Vibramech therefore makes use of heat treatment to stress relieve all welded screen components. The overall design philosophy is to minimise welding and maximise the use of swaged fasteners.

The company ensures a robust equipment design that will provide many years of reliable service, resulting in lower operating cost and reduced downtime. 

Please visit Vibramech’s new website at www.vibramechglobal.com for an overview on how Vibramech could assist with your current and future mineral processing requirements.

To appreciate the basic working principles of vibrating equipment, a basic analogy of a mass-spring system can be used. The stroke on this system is obtained by dynamic force generated by pairs of eccentric masses, rotating synchronously at the same angular velocity, but in opposite directions (i.e., by using geared exciters or vibrator motors).

Frequency (rpm) and stroke of vibrating equipment are selected based on the specific processing duty required, with typical acceleration ranging from 3 to 5G, with 740 to 1440 rpm.

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