Leading the local industry in asphalt plants, Gauteng-based Comar has designed a more compact and mobile plant for easier and more economical transportation, as well as quicker set-up time.

Already a well-known name among South African asphalt producers, Comar has leveraged its extensive in-house design, engineering and manufacturing capacity to continually improve plant design, performance and energy efficiency.

According to Comar director Ken Basson, the new design is in line with international trends towards increasingly mobile and smaller configurations. He emphasises, however, that this does not mean sacrificing plant capacity.

Comar operations manager De Wet Dreyer says many mobile plants still require some components to be transported on low bed trucks and to be erected using on-site cranes; this is contrary to the customer need for greater mobility and ease of movement.

“We now have a fully mobile design, which consists of two units,” says Dreyer. “The first chassis carries the feed bins and the other the drum, bag house and other components. There is considerable market interest, and we are preparing our mobile plant design for manufacturing.”

The result is quicker installation, allowing the plant to be set up within hours, rather than taking a week or two as with traditional methods. Operation of the plant can then begin almost immediately.

“The design is very versatile,” he says. “The operation can be set up to discard directly into a truck, for those projects that only require 100 or 200 tonnes of production, or it can be parked and configured to feed into the standard Comar skip rail and 100 tonne hot storage facility for larger scale projects.”

Comar also upgrades and optimises existing asphalt plants by working with customers on their current operations to improve their performance. This is done by retrofitting or replacing components.

The company has also developed a number of ancillary products for its plants, such as bitumen storage facilities, bag houses, bitumen decanting systems, hot storage facilities, silos, screw conveyors, rotary valves and purpose-built elevators. It has even developed a bitumen spray cart.

The plants are automated and can be operated with a user-friendly plant interface controlled from an HMI touch-screen, putting all key plant parameters at the operator’s fingertips.

Basson emphasises the after-sales support Comar offers, with dedicated service teams staffed by qualified mechanical engineers being on call to attend to customers’ equipment on site. Comar’s designs also prioritise the use of locally available components so that maintenance or repairs are not delayed by waiting for parts to arrive from abroad.