Within a year of unveiling its semimobile Bradford Breaker to the mining industry, comminution equipment specialist Tenova Takraf Africa has delivered two machines for junior coal miners ACC Coal’s Overlooked colliery and Bisichi Mining’s Black Wattle colliery, both in Mpumalanga, South Africa.

Supplied in January, the breakers operate at 300 t/h, breaking coal lumps of 80 mm to 350 mm, and were ordered based on both their low capital cost and ease of transport. These features are crucial to junior and small miners who are increasingly exploiting the small coal resources that remain, says Tenova Takraf Africa.

The semimobile Bradford Breaker ordered by Black Wattle is adjacent to the operation’s washing plant, while the breaker for Overlooked will be used to service the colliery for its remaining life-of-mine of 10 to 15 years, with the option to thereafter use it for another application.

Tenova Takraf Africa’s scope of work covers the design and manufacture of the breakers, with the mines responsible for installation on site. The company highlights that this is a relatively simple activity as the breaker comes complete with a civils template, which is then cast into a concrete slab on site. A further advantage of the single concrete slab, compared with more traditional multiple plinths, is the more accurate alignment of the machine, the performance of which is highly sensitive to misalignment.

Tenova Takraf Africa has marketed Bradford Breakers, under licence from US-based mining equipment supplier Terrasource Global, to the South African mining industry since the 1970s, with the breaker having proved successful in the simultaneous sizing and cleaning of raw coal.

Developed originally for the softer coal of the US market to remove impurities and contamination from feed material, Tenova Takraf Africa notes that the Bradford Breaker has seen incremental, but far-reaching, improvements over the decades to tailor it to the increasingly demanding conditions and difficult coal of the South African mining industry. The latest development, the semimobile Bradford Breaker, is a further demonstration of how this technology is adaptable to the evolving needs of the industry.

As the smallest model in the range of Bradford Breakers marketed by Tenova Takraf Africa, the semimobile version offers the benefits of the traditional breaker in a more compact machine. With affordability being a critical factor for junior and small miners, the design of the semimobile Bradford Breaker has been rationalised, without compromising on performance, with features such as a centralised lubrication system offered as an optional extra.

Essentially a rotary breaker, the Bradford Breaker consists of a large revolving cylindrical drum driven by an electric motor. As the drum rotates, lifters hoist the lumps of material to a predetermined height and the material then drops, under gravity, onto the screen plates where it shatters along natural cleavage lines. The machine is easy to maintain and repair, as it is driven from one end only by a simple drive assembly.

Mining Weekly reported in October that Tenova Takraf Africa offers junior miners in the surface mining industry a tailor-made package that will help new mining operations produce State-owned power utility Eskom-grade coal.
The package, available since 2015, comprises a breaking and destoning plant, consisting of a rotary coal breaker, conveyor system, primary crusher and spreader system.

Tenova Takraf engineered technologies GM Richard Späth explained at the time that the company had supplied two breakers to junior miners, with one of the projects developing into an ‘Eskom-type’ coal processing plant. He pointed out that this “Eskom package” complemented Tenova Takraf’s new market strategy, which had been refocused to deal with the challenges that resulted from the commodity price slump between 2011 and 2016.
Tenova Takraf is an integrated solutions provider to the global mining, bulk materials handling and minerals industries, offering technological solutions as well as process and commodity knowledge along with the industry value chains. The company will attendthis year’s Investing in African Mining Indaba, in Cape Town, at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from February 6 to 9.