The Evans Decline at the Degrussa Copper Mine has three main pump stations for dewatering to prevent mine flooding located at the 2001, 2032 and 2151 level pumping upto 200 litres/sec out of the mine.

JTMEC have been involved prior to the initial completion of construction providing design, CAD, automation, commissioning and engineering support services.

The pump stations each include 1000V switchrooms, with soft starter pump control, auxiliary drive VSDs, Allen Bradley PLC and Touchscreen operation and DeviceNet instrumentation system.

For these facilities, JTMEC have done:

• –          Electrical, controls and instrumentation commissioning.
• –          Electrical CAD drafting.
• –          PLC and HMI Touchscreen programming
• –          DeviceNet configuration and instrumentation setup.
• –          Remote control SCADA
• –          Remote access support

In additional to initial setup and commissioning activities, we have continued to support the facility with improvement project work including:

• –          Upgrading gland water instrumentation to include flowmeters and automation so that gland flows can be balanced between the pumps in any of the stations.
• –          Relocation of cabling and DeviceNet nodes out of washdown areas to improve reliability of the equipment.
• –          Upgrading of the VSDs to be use the same manufacture as the PLC equipment to ensure more robust communications and improve VSD automation.
• –          Optimise automation programs to add in maintenance features such as valve testing routines, auto-recovery from power failure and different pump station start-up options.
• –          Investigate leakage currents on VSD circuits and optimise installation to minimise these.

These improvement projects have been done in partnership with site-based operations personnel in order to maximise operational benefits and asset management improvements. With a focus on providing the right expertise, JTMEC have been able to maintain a long-term support relationship at the site and provide value services to Sandfire Resources.