Rail wagon dumpers, unloader, or tipplers – as they are called, depending on the maker or the country you’re in – are the huge machines that lock in rail cars for rotary dumping, sometimes with a simple side dump or a complete inversion. The valuable cargoes such as coal or iron ore, then fall through vibrators and onto conveyors for speeding to stockpile or direct to the waiting ship for loading. The unique rotary coupling on the rail car sets has been around for decades now and still astounds those who see the dumping process for the first time. It allows dumping by inversion without uncoupling and is only rivaled by bottom dumping rail cars, which are the vogue in countries such as Australia and New Zealand where winter weather extremes are not as pronounced. And, despite some setbacks through cyclones and floods and poor weather as 2011 began, the dry bulk industry is generally stepping forward with a new sense of urgency this year.
Good year
“Our 2010 was a good year,” says Tim Sexton, Manager of Product Support for Metso Minerals, the world’s leading maker of rail wagon unloaders. Metso has more rail car dumpers in service than any other manufacturer. “We still had a little blip back to the recession with a couple of orders being cancelled, but by and large the past year has been good,” Sexton adds from his Pittsburgh, USA office. “The horizon looks very busy as well.” In Bristol, England, the Schade Aumund Group has set up a small team of specialist engineers in a new bulk unloading office. It’s been a year since the June 2010 opening, but Matt Jones, General Manager for Schade Lagertechnik, says there have been more inquiries than expected, although “the significant part tended to be either for potential projects in the very early stages (pre-feasibility) or for general interest only.” However, he sees several major projects likely to go to tender in the next few weeks or months and Schade is pursuing them keenly.
Careful buyers
Another manufacturer with global sales, Harry Edelman, Executive Vice President of Heyl & Patterson, in Pittsburgh, says 2010 was an “OK” year, but he cautions that would-be buyers “are being very, very careful” about placing orders. “They’re dragging their feet,” says Edelman. As a trend, he says international buyers are opting for “new equipment” while in recession-plagued United States, the order of the day is still to repair and patch existing equipment.
Not so in neighbouring Canada, where all three major coal export terminals on the West Coast are installing new rail car dumpers and positioners concurrently as a burst of expansion fever hits the coal export facilities in British Columbia. Metso has secured a twin rotary dumper installation for Westshore Terminals, North America’s busiest coal export terminal in Delta, just south of downtown Vancouver BC. The project followed a debottlenecking study to see how the terminal could better meet its capacity. With Metso’s help, Westshore is installing three new train positioners or indexers designed to speed up the coal dumping process significantly. Westshore’s Manager Engineering & Environment, David Crook, says the debottlenecking study identified several key choke points on the terminal site such as transfer stations and the existing single and tandem rotary dumpers. Not surprisingly, he was looking for several key factors in awarding the big new coal handling contract. “Ports are at the heavy end of the usage spectrum quite unlike power plants and others with rail car dumpers,” he explains. “We insisted on robust design; reliability; ease of maintenance; and uniformity of equipment.” It didn’t hurt that Metso had recently added two separate rotary dumper barrels in different projects at the expanding terminal over the past few years. “We have had three dumpers from Metso and it made sense to standardize our components,” says Crook. Engineering design work for the twin dumper, three positioner project is underway and the challenge will be to do the work over a month or two in the fall of 2012 without seriously disrupting terminal operations and throughput. The first positioner will be placed at the exit end of the existing twin dumper to ensure it works at capacity while a single rotary dumper is removed and replaced with a new twin set. The exit positioner is a great help in handling a mid-train locomotive used by Westshore’s major customer, Canadian Pacific Rail, which has challenged smooth loading in the past.
Impressive list
Meanwhile, Metso has an impressive list of recent contract successes for rail car dumpers including two replacement rotary barrels for a Westshore rival also in Port Metro Vancouver, Neptune Bulk Terminals, which is expanding capacity to 8.5 million tonnes a year. And Metso is also replacing two rotary barrels for Ridley Terminals in the Port of Prince Rupert by the end of the year, as that northern BC facility doubles capacity to 24 million tonnes over the next three to five years. As well, Metso has just finished an installation of a single dumper for Kansas City Powerline and is doing similar work for Hoosier Energy for another coal-fired Indiana power plant. “There are all kinds of things happening in Australia and China,” adds Metso’s Sexton. Projects in each country involve two dumper lines and tandem rotary barrels grouped to handle up to 16 rail cars at a time. Sexton says the project successes show that Metso “is number one in the world, no question. “Our equipment is better, more cost effective, and you are not just buying the product, you are buying a world-class company that is financially sound.”
Clearer plan
While others would argue their own merits, there’s no doubting the scramble of manufacturers vying for the big business of rail wagon dumping. Heyl & Patterson has been a world-wide name in the business for almost 125 years. Harry Edelman continues to look for a clearer plan to emerge from Washington DC and the bureaucrats before getting too excited about any talk of recovery. While business has been enough to keep a brief smile on his face, much of the success has come from upgrades and rebuilds throughout the United States. Outside that theatre of operations, Heyl & Patterson has also started to see success with a licensee arrangement it has with FL Smidth in India. With a year under his belt in the Schade Lagertechnik office in Bristol, Matt Jones is still a little uncertain about the rest of this year and into 2012, although he expects some big contracts to go to bid. Schade supplies rail car dumpers to coal-fired power plants, export coal and iron ore handling through ports, and for use in materials intake at cement plants. Schade offers a wide range of what it calls wagon tipplers and backs it up with extensive experience and knowledge, says Jones. “The range of systems offered covers the low to medium duty requirements with unloading rates from 10 to 60 wagons per hour. In addition to the tippler itself, we also offer the complete unloading system, including the train positioners, train holding devices, track hopper designs and hopper extract feeders.” All tipplers are designed, engineered and project-managed from the Bristol UK office and from a plant in Herne, Germany, using a modern 3D Cad system, fully integrated operating and control systems, PLC and HMI facilities and world-class hydraulic systems. Looking at world trends in the industry, Jones says the bulk materials industry is extremely busy, particularly in Indian, Brazil, South Africa and in North America. “Engineering consultants are extremely active and it seems this high level of activity will continue for the foreseeable future.”
Contract successes
For Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Fordertechnik GmbH (TKF) there was a noticeable increase in port bulk handling materials activity throughout the world in 2010 following the slump of 2008 and 2009. According to Dr Wei Ye, Vice President of Project Sales, TKF has mirrored this trend with contract successes in several port handling projects including rail car dumpers in Brazil
, Australia, Russia and other countries. In April 2010, TKF’s Brazilian subsidiary Belo Horizonte supplied two tandem car dumpers complete with its own train positioner for the Porto Sudeste port complex in the State of Rio De Janeiro for LLX Sudeste Operacoes Portuarias LTDA. Ye sees the project as an excellent example of cross country co-operation between different ThyssenKrupp subsidiaries in its worldwide network. The new equipment will be able to handle trains up to 160 cars long with three locomotives and will have a capacity of 40 dumping cycles per hour. And another major Brazilian iron ore producer has also placed an order for two TKF rail car dumpers, this time at CSN’s Port of Itaguai, for installation in 2012. Trains will be up to 132 cars long with four locomotives. The first wagon is positioned in an area of the wheel clamps in front of the car dumper and a wheel clamp locks that wagon by means of hydraulic actuated and horizontally arranged wheel grippers. TKF has also had success in Indonesia for coal miner PTBA (PT Bukit Asam Persero Tbk) at its Tarahan Coal Terminal. Two new rail car unloading stations are being built and TKF has won the coal wagon unloading project involving to O-type tandem rotary rail car dumpers, two positioners, four wheel grippers and four apron feeders for extraction of the coal from underneath the bunkers. The rail wagon dumpers will have an average unloading rate of 3,000 tonnes per hour and have the capacity to operate each barrel singly if required. Train lengths are up to 60 cars and require the locomotive to be uncoupled before unloading wagons via the positioners. In Peru, a warehouse expansion project for Cormin Callao at the Port of Callao has seen a new TKF side discharge dumper ordered late in 2010 for handling copper, lead and zinc. This is ThyssenKrupp’s first venture into Peru for car dumpers and Dr Ye says the client chose TKF based on state-of-the-art technology, capability to execute large-scale projects, and first-class technical service, with the contract going to the German company “after accurate comparisons of several competitors.”