Mining and metals

Did you know that certain AC drives are designed for specifically the needs of mining and mineral processing plants; coping with extreme conditions, heavy loading, and controlling equipment installed a long distance away?

When using VLT® and VACON® drives, often you can even save on the cost of other equipment.

The growing world population and increasing volume of people moving to cities creates an ongoing need for new infrastructure and a continuous demand for mined resources. This is good news for the mining and metals industry. However, mine sites and mineral processing facilities and associated stockyards and port operations present some of the most challenging production environments.

Intelligent heat management and compact enclosures

It’s popular practice to install drives in relatively clean, pressurized, air-conditioned switch rooms and substations. However, this creates challenges as larger and more expensive air-conditioning systems could be needed to deal with heat loads. Thanks to the unique back-channel cooling design of higher power VLT® drives and VACON® liquid-cooled drives, heat loads are reduced enabling the use of smaller, lower-cost air-conditioning systems.

The sheer size of mining operations frequently means that cable lengths between drives and motors are long. Danfoss AC drives are designed to provide trouble-free operation with cable lengths up to at least 150 m for screened cables and 300 m for unscreened cables. As no additional output filters are required with these cable lengths, this saves space, installation time and costs compared to more traditional drive solutions.

Mining sites are often found in remote locations that are difficult to access, and harsh, dusty environments with extreme temperature ranges are common. For optimized up-time and reliable operations, it’s vital to have the right equipment installed and competent support readily available. Our world-leading after-sales service and support is available 24/7, no matter how remote your site is.

To optimize uptime and maximize drive lifetime, it makes sense to install a drive designed for harsh environments. Danfoss AC drives are compact and yet robust, and offer both energy-efficient design and low power losses. Available with coated PCBs, they operate reliably over decades of use in challenging conditions saving maintenance costs, ensuring better asset availability and providing you with the lowest cost of ownership. Modular medium-voltage drives are especially designed for rugged reliability in harsh environments.