Chinese-owned Peruvian iron ore mining company Shougang Hierro Peru SAS recently awarded Italy’s Bedeschi a contract for the supply of a new stacker and stockyard conveyor. The Bedeschi equipment forms part of a new expansion project at Shougang Hierro and will be installed in the San Nicolas beneficiation area, where the iron ore is processed and stocked before shipping. The operation is located on the southern coast of Peru, approximately 530 km from the city of Lima, in the district of Marcona and the province of Nasca in the Ica Region.

Bedeschi will be responsible of engineering, manufacturing and delivery of one conveyor (width 1,000mm and total length of 710 m) and one stacker STK33/1000 designed for a nominal stacking rate of 1,500 t/h of iron ore. Bedeschi is also supporting Shougang Hierro in the optimisation of existing equipment, implementing DEM analysis and optimised design on interfaces with the new supplied equipment.

Shougang Hierro’s open pit mine uses Chinese TYHI WK12 rope shovels loading Komatsu HD1500-7 and Caterpillar 785C 15 ton trucks to transport ore to primary crushers, from where ore is conveyed to San Nicolas via a belt approximately 15.3 km long and with a capacity of 2,000 t/h.

The secondary crushing plant at San Nicolas sees the iron ore reduced in size by approximately 95% then fed to a magnetic separation plant for mill grinding and concentration via cyclones, magnetic separation and flotation, separated into two types of products, high grade iron concentrate for sintering and the other used to feed the pelletising plant, after going through a filtration process. In the filter plant, thickening, homogenisation and filtering of the pulp received from the magnetic plant are carried out, leaving the ore ready to be made into pellets.