Since February 2018, TUMAD Mining Inc has been profiting from state-of-the-art electrical and automation technology from Siemens Turkey for its Lapseki mine in Turkey’s Çanakkale province. TUMAD has been satisfied with the turnkey solution – so much so that the company has decided to work with Siemens Turkey on an upcoming project.
Turkey is an up-and-coming gold producer. Research shows that the country has reserves of up to 6,500 t, which make up for as much as an eighth of globally proven reserves. When it comes to gold production, Turkey’s mining industry is active in all steps of the value chain – from exploration and mining all the way to refining and preparing the precious metal for different end uses. One of Turkey’s more recent projects involving gold has been the opening of the Lapseki mine in the Çanakkale province, operated by TUMAD Mining Inc.
Over the entire operation period, which is expected to extend to 2027, the mine’s four pits are estimated to produce a total of 7.15 Mt of ore. The proportions of gold and silver per tonne are 1.85 g and 1.86 g, respectively. The production cycle boasts a recovery rate of 94.91% for gold and 72.35% for silver. “With dimensions like these, one thing is clear: operations have to be depend-able and economical. So when it came time to select a solution provider for the mine, TUMAD turned to Siemens Turkey, the country’s market leader for electrical and automation technology for minerals works.”
“With our high level of expert knowledge for turnkey projects, expansions, conversions and modernisations, we turned out to be an excellent partner for the Lapseki mine,” says Emrah Mehmetogullari, Account Manager for Minerals at Siemens Turkey. Extremely valuable was the fact that the Siemens engineers were able to draw on their experience with other mining projects in the country. The range of services supplied to TUMAD for the Lapseki mine covered the delivery and installation of electrical equipment and integrated solutions including design, planning, engineering, project management, manufacturing, installation, testing and commissioning on a turnkey basis. “As many local facilities as possible and fully local resources were involved in the project,” notes Mehmetogullari. Among the scope of delivery is three control rooms – one each for the mill, the crusher, and the adsorption, desorption and refining (ADR) plant – and five electrical rooms – for the crusher, mill, leach, ADR plant and filter press. The automation system at the Lapseki mine is made up of two redundant OS servers, three clients, a web server, three engineering stations and four CPU 410s. The equipment processes 2,300 hardwired signals and a total of 4,000 signals communicating with third-party systems.
“For the process control system, TUMAD selected Cemat MinAS, which is based on Simatic PCS 7, the most proven distributed control system in the world. Cemat MinAS delivers everything necessary to seamlessly meet the most relevant demands of the industry: productivity, plant availability and energy efficiency are cov-ered, and for end users the system is easy to configure and use. Since the Lapseki mine was commissioned in February 2018, staff members at TUMAD have been able to depend on the technology from Siemens to help them get their jobs done. In fact, the satisfaction level is so high that TUMAD has again decided to work with Siemens Turkey on a turnkey basis for its Balıkesir-İvrindi gold and silver mine processing project in western Turkey.”
