By John Burant, Vice President Global Business Development, Flanders Electric
In the day and age when productivity and reliability rule – mining equipment such as electric rope shovels are being pushed to the performance limits while still being required to maintain a high level of availability. Optimizing and balancing this relationship is at the core of the Flanders Freedom control system and DC motors upgrades. In 2012, Flanders installed the Freedom control system, adaptive control system called “Optimized Bank Performance”, and the high performance M21 crowd motor – termed Freedom Level 3. A case study was presented at the Haulage and Loading conference in 2015 to demonstrate the pre- and postupgrade performance with Freedom Level 3. Flanders has now taken it a step further by installing two high performance M24 hoist motors – this upgraded configuration is termed Freedom Level 7.An updated case study will be presented to outline the performance results of the Freedom Level 7 upgrade.