Boosting Mine Chute Design - Improve Chute Design and Reduce Costs with Altair EDEM

Wood is responsible for assessing material handling transfer chutes for crushed ore. The large number of transfer chutes must be optimized to enable the transfer of bulk material from one conveyor belt to another, and to adequately direct the flow of material. Some of the most common issues with material transfer designs include plugging, segregation, and abrasion wear. In an effort to reduce operating maintenance costs, Wood employed the use of Altair EDEM, a discrete element modeling (DEM) solution, to visualize the flow of material and analyze forces and moments acting on different parts of the transfer chute. As a result, Wood reduced the weight of this transfer chute by approximately 10%, adding $20,000 in NPV to the project.