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Mount Isa

Background

Mount Isa is a city in North West Region of Queensland, Australia with a population of circa 23,000. It came into existence because of the vast mineral deposits found in the area. Xstrata Mine, formerly called Mount Isa Mines (MIM) is one of the most productive single mines in world history, based on combined production of lead, silver, copper and zinc.

Mount Isa Mines (Xstrata 100%) operates two separate mining and processing streams, copper and zinc-lead-silver employing around 2,600 people. The copper operations include two underground copper mines from which 6.2 million tonnes of ore is mined per annum; a concentrator with 7.2 million tonnes per annum capacity; and a copper smelter.

The Project

The existing Winder Motor on the U62 shaft at Mt Isa has been in operation since 1972 bringing copper ore to the surface from the mine face more than 1,500m below ground and is one of the main sources of revenue for the mine. Due to the strategic and financial importance of the motor to the mine, the customer had become increasingly concerned about the age and the future reliability of the motor.

Quartzelec was engaged in early 2007 to undertake a full inspection of the motor and to provide a fully-costed solution to provide a further 25 years reliable operation. The outcome of the inspection gave two solutions:

• Option 1 Fully rewind the motor
• Option 2 Replace the motor

Whilst option 1 was the lower cost option it was proving extremely difficult to engineer a suitable outage of sufficient length to facilitate the rewind so Xstrata chose to proceed with the replacement motor option.

One of the many parameters that Xstrata specified for the replacement motor was that the field windings in the new motor had to be the same as the existing in order that the existing field winding spares held in stores could be used in the event of an emergency.

Outcome

By utilising Quartzelec’s in-house DC Design Engineering capability it was possible not only to provide a motor with an identical footprint and field configuration as the original but to increase the rating of the motor from 5.6MW to 6.75MW.