ANDRITZ Separation
ANDRITZ Separation is the world’s leading separation specialist, with the deepest knowledge, broadest technical resources, and most comprehensive service and automation solutions. For more than 150 years, we have helped our customers respond to the world's environmental, energy-resource, health, and nutrition challenges by leveraging our extensive knowledge to create, develop, implement, and service innovative separation solutions. By solving these fundamental challenges, we create lasting value and drive growth across every industry we serve.
A partner with the expertise to tackle tomorrow’s challenges
Increasing throughput while preserving product quality, minimising energy consumption and operating costs or increasing water recovery: efficient separation is a crucial competitive advantage in the mining and minerals business. Having mastered these challenges for more than a century, we at ANDRITZ know how to tailor our complete range of state-of-the-art technologies to meet your needs and to find the best processing solutions. And, by exploring innovative new ways to automate and monitor remote facilities, we ensure that you are ready for the future as well.
Automating processes, cutting costs: one step ahead in digitalisation
Digital innovation is bringing a variety of benefits to industrial operations, and the mining and minerals sector is no exception. ANDRITZ has combined the power of smart sensors, big data analytics, and virtual and augmented reality to develop Metris, a portfolio of digital industrial solutions. Within this portfolio, Metris addIQ control systems offer cutting-edge machine and process control for solid/liquid separation equipment and systems. To ensure safe, trouble-free operations, ANDRITZ automation solutions range from upgrades to individual systems, including electrics, control equipment and instrumentation, to full automation of entire processes and plants. For greenfield plants, we design and test using dynamic simulations in order to ensure error-free startup. For upgrades and optimisation projects, we can customise a complete range of engineering, process simulation, control and training solutions depending on your individual requirements.
A wide range of equipment to tailor the right separation solution to your needs
ANDRITZ’s current portfolio covers the full solid/liquid separation process from sedimentation and dewatering to drying and ensures excellent throughput of high-quality products – all with low operating costs and maximum reliability. The variety of different thickening, dewatering and drying technologies, ranging from thickeners to decanter or pusher centrifuges, heavy-duty belt presses or hyperbaric disc filters to closed-cycle contact dryers means that we are able to configure a processing line tailored to fit your specific needs.
For the efficient and responsible treatment of coal tailings, for example, one line currently being installed in Australia consists of a custom thickener combined with belt presses (whose efficiency is increased even further by the addition of Metris addIQ RheoScan). Tailings treatment processes in two different sand washing plants are also using a similar setup (with a gravity belt table between the thickening and dewatering step), after pilot tests showed this tailings dewatering line to be the most efficient. But you can also choose between screen bowl decanters, disc filters and filter presses, the latter a flagship for the use of IIoT: The intelligent filter press. In essence, the chance to analyse your processing requirements, conduct tests in a state-of-the-art laboratory, and be offered an individualised line solution from a wide range of thickening and dewatering technologies – this is the strength of an experienced partner like ANDRITZ.
Efficient tailings treatment with automatic adjustment of polymer dosage
Tailings treatment continues to be one of the fastest growing challenges in the mining sector. At the same time, environmental risks, space constraints and water scarcity all need to be managed as cost-effectively as possible – after all, the result is a waste product rather than one that turns a profit. The two major cost factors are the polymer added to thicken the sludge and the operator hours required for this process. Innovative solutions like the Metris addIQ RheoScan, the first optical measurement system that detects sludge viscosity during thickening and dewatering processes, is just one example for more efficient tailings treatment. RheoScan can react instantaneously, adapting inline to the varying feed characteristics and setting the optimum polymer dosage rate. The system has proven itself in the environmental sector, in applications like municipal and industrial wastewater treatment, and can be adapted to other sludge conditions such as coal tailings. The first installations have consistently met the initial target of an average reduction of 20% in flocculant consumption. What’s more, the efficient and accurate dosing of polymer has also significantly reduced overspills while increasing the efficiency of thickening and dewatering in the downstream machinery as well.
