Overlay Wear Plate Solves Underground Mining Wear Problem

In underground mining operations, the ore material is transported from one station to another in skip cars. These skip cars have a wear plate inside them, which comes in contact with the ore material. As a result of continuous loading and unloading, the wear plates undergo abrasion when ore is dropped or slides along them. The ore material is dropped from a height of 30 ft onto a wear plate deflector and made to slide into the skip car. Similar abrasion due to sliding is encountered during unloading as the car is tilted at a 30 degree angle to empty the ore onto the conveyor. In the next section, we will discuss details of Trimay T171^* wear plate, which extends the life of the wear plate.

Trimay T171 Wear Plate

Trimay has designed an overlay wear plate, the T171^*, which reduces the surface material loss of the wear plates by offering more resistance to abrasion. The new wear plate has a thickness of only half an inch. By using this overlay plate, the life of the skip car deflector can be extended.

The T171^* overlay is made up of iron-based steel and has excellent glass forming chemistry that permits high levels of undercooling during welding. It has a hardness test rating of 68 - 71 HRc and unique wear resistance to severe sliding abrasion in harsh service environments. The T171^* also has high impact resistance and toughness equivalent to 400 Brinell Q&T plate. This is due to formation of complex borocarbide phases, which are fully wetted by the matrix and avoid delamination, premature pull-out, and crack nucleation. They also reduce stress concentration sites and the ductile matrix provides good crack blunting and bridging, thus resulting in better impact resistance.

Performance of Trimay T171

The T171^* wear plate exceeded the performance of Q&T and the Chrome Carbide plates appreciably. The performance of the T171^* was measured after one million tons of ore was hauled by it. It was removed for maintenance purposes in order to measure the degree of wear. It was observed that its service life was 2.9 times that of the 500 Brinnel quench and temper (Q&T) monolithic wear plate having a thickness of 5/8 inch.

Figure 1. Trimay T171 overlay wear plate, 1/2 inch thickness, after deflecting 410,000 tons and exceeding Q&T plate life by 1.2x

Figure 2. Trimay T171 wear plate has exceeded Q&T plate life by 1.8x

Figure 3. Trimay T171 plate has exceeded Q&T plate life by 2.9x

When compared with the chrome carbide plates, the service life of T171^* was twice that of chrome carbide plate of 5/8 inch thickness. The mine engineers were confident that the Trimay wear plate (before needing replacement) would surpass the Q&T Plate life by 4.3 times when put back to service.

About Trimay

Trimay develops and manufactures the highest quality wear overlays for customers seeking to maximize efficiency by extending the life of equipment, parts and pipelines exposed to severe wear conditions. Trimay achieves its high-quality standard through research and development, partner companies and exclusive suppliers, as well as through in-house experimentation and process optimization.

* Developed by Trimay Wearplate Ltd. using NanoSteel® Technology under license from The NanoSteel® Company, Inc.

Primary information source: Trimay Wear Plate Ltd

For more information on this source please visit Trimay Wear Plate.