Tag Archives: Lars Furtenbach

Metso boosts wear life on premium rubber offering with Skega Life

Metso is introducing to its mill lining portfolio an innovative rubber, Skega™ Life, with, it claims, up to 25% longer wear life compared with the current premium rubber, Skega Classic.

The new rubber type is developed in Metso’s own laboratory and validated by field studies. Skega Life is a part of Metso’s Planet Positive offering, enabling increased sustainability and safety, optimised throughput, and increased uptime due to improved wear resistance and lower maintenance, the company says.

Fredrik Johansson, Global Product Manager, Rubber and Poly-Met mill linings, Metso, said: “We are excited to introduce Skega Life rubber to our mill liner portfolio. The new rubber is specially developed to have a very good wear resistance in grinding mills processing high abrasive ores. It can be used anywhere where a customer has a rubber application, but it is most beneficial in ball mills larger than 14 ft (4.3 m), AG, and SAG mills of 18 ft or smaller.”

Lars Furtenbach, Director, Research & Technology Development, Metso, added: “Mill liners play a crucial role in the mining process and Metso’s liners are always designed by our experts to meet the customers’ production targets and the mill conditions and enhancing overall process reliability. Field studies and tests have shown that our new rubber compound can have up to 25% longer wear life. The longer wear life reduces CO2 emissions and less liner material will end up in the tailings.”

Metso calls itself a world leader in developing and manufacturing high-performance mill liners. It pioneered the use of rubber linings and invented Poly-Met™, Megaliner™, and Orebed™ mill linings. New products are constantly being developed to enhance customers’ ever more advanced processes, it says, adding that the recent innovations include 3D wear scanning, a full Megaliner range, trommel deflector, Turbo Pulp Lifter, Liner Positioning System and a mill liner recycling service.

Metso Outotec embeds virtual reality into mill lining inspection process

Metso Outotec is launching a patented Virtual Inspection tool for horizontal grinding mill linings to, it says, take the benefits of 3D scanning to a new level.

The new tool enables the scanned mill linings to be viewed in virtual reality and offers an efficient and safe environment for technical discussions, according to the company.

“This innovation is a continuation of Metso Outotec’s pioneering role and its more than six decades of experience in engineering and manufacturing mill liners and grinding mills,” Metso Outotec said.

‘On-site’ mill lining inspections can be safely hosted while being off-site, thanks to the fully immersive virtual walkthroughs and the ability to comprehensively review any particular point of the mill lining. Features like remaining liner thickness measurements and profile review enable the users to make real-time assessments of the liners, while the colour-coded heatmap mode helps in analysing the wear patterns and in detecting problem areas, so that the mill lining design and performance can be improved.

The Virtual Inspection tool aligns with Metso Outotec’s aftermarket digital strategy by improving the efficiency and safety of its services through advanced wear-part analyses, it added.

Lars Furtenbach, Research and Technology Development Manager, Mill Lining Solutions, said: “Our patented MillMapper™ 3D scanning of mill linings has been the industry benchmark for years. The scans are used to understand the way the mill liners wear, to optimise the liner design, and to accurately predict the reline schedules. There is a growing need to find new ways to reach out to our customers and to discuss mill lining performance with them remotely. Our customers will benefit from our strong experience with over 8,000 mills worldwide combined with the market’s most comprehensive offering and the new software platform.”