Industrial vacuum delivered to aluminium smelter

Local furnace and industrial services company Dickinson Group last month delivered its new MegaVac cyclone loader to resources company South 32, where the machine will be used for a large basement cleaning project for the company’s Mozal aluminium smelter, in Mozambique.

Dickinson Group CEO Trevor Dickinson tells, the company acquired the MegaVac from industrial cleaning equipment manufac- turer KOKS Group, in the Netherlands, earlier this year.

KOKS’ MegaVac cyclone loader is a self-supporting vacuum, storage and bag-metering unit and will be used in South 32’s smelter for the recovery of 90 t/d of bath material. The unit, which has a large filter surface area of 40 m2, consists of a vacuum system and a silo. The bath material is sucked into the silo within a closed system and, therefore, without any emissions, and is then dispensed into a bag.

The unit offers significant benefits, as it is easy to transport on a chassis, semitrailer or other transport system. No physical labour is required for the packing and disposing of waste. The unit can be used on a standalone basis, as it can be connected to a diesel engine, and is also built to the latest environmental safety standards.

Dickinson Group aluminium division MD Clinton Pretorius said the unit was brought in as there is a demand in the industrial market to recover waste materials.

“When assessing industrial cleaning or vacuuming, a lot of it focuses on spillage and companies having to hire people to clean the waste. This unit looks at bagging to recover the material. “There are a number of vacuum trucks in the country that are very generic. With this unit, we have . . . an opportunity [to] help our customers more than other products will,” he says.

Pretorius notes that bagging to recover materials is important, especially in the aluminium industry, where the rate of spillage is higher than what companies can absorb in their systems. The MegaVac’s 6 000 m3/h roots blower gives the unit its high suction and displacement capacity, which makes it possible to process and transport large quantities of dry substances, liquids, gravel and sand in a short time.

Combined with the bagging system, large quantities of dry materials can be metered into bags in a short period and subsequently disposed of in sealed bags or containers. Pretorius says the user benefits from the significant time savings and cost reductions.

“Companies are under tremendous strain to implement cost savings and one of the biggest areas to save costs is through recovering waste at the plants. “We are trying to recover that waste and warehouse it for customers,” he says.

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