Avoid pirate and 'copycat' dust suppression equipment
Dust Buster News

Underground colliery dust suppression specialists Colliery Dust Control (CDC) of Springs has sounded a fresh warning to the industry to avoid using pirate or inferior quality equipment.

This arises from the use by some collieries recently of pirate scrubber boxes with CDC fan units on continuous miners, resulting in several instances of fan motor failures and burnouts. In another case a colliery used a "copycat" scrubber unit which was sub-standard both in performance and safety.

"Frankly we are very surprised that some collieries see fit to use pirate or inferior equipment just for the sake of saving some money on the initial outlay. The pirate equipment is obviously cheaper than ours, but the cost implications further down the line are quite serious," Bob Johnstone, CDC’s general manager, pointed out.

The pirate box currently in circulation costs a couple of thousand rands less than the authentic CDC box. "But the downside of that short-term cost saving is two-fold. Firstly, it means that your prime objective of capturing the dust and scrubbing the dust-laden air is not being achieved properly. And secondly, because the box is mismatched to the fan unit, it means that the unit will fail, resulting in you having to replace or at least repair the unit, representing a much greater cost than your original saving – running into tens of thousands of rands."

"The initial saving on the cheap box is soon lost. Even after the motor has been rewound and put back into service your problem is still with you, because it is going to fail again, at further cost to yourself."

Johnsone added that in the case of the "copycat" scrubber unit, the folly of going the cheap route is even greater, because of the safety factor, where not only money is involved but people’s lives are also potentially being put at risk.

In this case a company involved in another industry with negligible knowledge and no experience of dust suppression technology, opportunistically developed a scrubber unit loosely based on the CDC unit and sold it to a local colliery at a third of the price of the CDC unit.

The motor in the "copycat" unit failed after the unit had been in operation for about three months. "This is hardly surprising as the motor has not been developed for this application, as ours has been," Johnstone stated.

"But aside from the operational and performance deficiencies of the unit, what really worries us about it is that it doesn’t have all the safety features that we believe are essential for use in an underground colliery environment."

The key issue at stake here is that the motor in the "copycat" scrubber unit has no fan impeller track. "The presence of a non-sparking impeller track ensures that in the event of failure the impeller is prevented from rubbing against the casing, which if it did occur could cause a methane explosion followed by a dust explosion."