Damtshaa’s BATEMAN 150 t/h modular DMS plant trial-erected at the factory. The structure housing the load-out facility is on the left with the re-concentration cyclone on the top level. The space below it is for the 50 t storage bin. The orange-coloured screen in the centre of the picture prepares the feed for the primary cyclones.

A modular dense-media separation (DMS) plant to process kimberlite, which has been delivered to the Damtshaa mine, forms part of a BATEMAN project to establish a diamond-processing plant and its associated infrastructure for Debswana at the mine about 17 km east of Orapa in northern Botswana.

The processing plant, rated at 200 t/h, has primary- and secondary crushing, integrated DMS, load-out and waste-disposal circuits. It will process a feed of kimberlite from the BK pipes in the area to produce a diamond concentrate which will be transported by road for final treatment at the main recovery facility at Orapa.

The integrated DMS plant comprises a 150 t/h primary circuit feeding a 50 t/h reconcentration circuit. These circuits have a common dense-medium supply circuit, the first of its type to be provided by BATEMAN. The diamond concentrate is stored in a 50 t load-out facility, fully automated to deposit batches of the concentrate into truck-mounted flasks for transportation to Orapa.

This is the fifth modular DMS plant with a capacity of 150 t/h to be designed and manufactured by BATEMAN in the past three years. With 120 t of steelwork and 95 t of platework, it is also the largest plant of this type to have been supplied by BATEMAN. The top floor of the load-out structure is 23 m off the ground and two mobile cranes, one of 20 t and the other of 18 t, were required for the trial erection of the plant at the workshop near Johannesburg. It was then dismantled into sections small enough to be conveyed by 15 Superlink road-haul trucks to the Orapa mine about 810 km away.

The order for the modular DMS plant was placed in June 2001 with trial erection at the factory being completed in March 2002. Dismantling and transport to site required two-and-a-half weeks and on site re-erection and installation of the housing six and four weeks respectively.

For more details on the kimberlite process plant, kindly contact

Robert Abate, General Manager, Modular Plants, on
+27-11-899-2238 or email modular@batemanengineering.com.

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