CSA Mine’s newly installed ventilation fans, which can deliver twice the airflow of their predecessors, have been designed with the future in mind as the mine plans to go deeper in the coming years.
CSA’s Projects Manager Tom Mackay ad-vised the set of four new primary ventilation fans came into operation early last week.
“This is a significant milestone for CSA as the project to design, supply and build the fans commenced almost five years ago,” Mr Mackay said.
“Achieving an operational state in the last week is an exciting milestone and delivers an improvement to underground mine condi-tions.”
The purpose of the primary ventilation fans is to provide airflow for safe underground working conditions.
Large volumes of fresh air from the surface are required as mine operations can create dust and underground diesel equipment have emissions that need to be exhausted from the workings.
The new fans are much larger than the exist-ing fans and are capable of delivering twice the airflow.
Each fan is rated at 2.7MW (which is equiv-alent to a little over 2014 horsepower) and individually have been tested to move 400 cubic meters of air each second.
The fans were designed and manufactured by Zitron, a Spanish company that specializes in underground ventilation for tunnels and mines.
“Zitron’s manufacture program commenced early last year and the build team mobilized to CSA mine site in January this year.
“Commissioning and cutover of the fans was cause for celebration particularly follow-ing some of the testing results which verified design performance,” Mr Mackay said.
“The long planning and design period of the project was necessary to include planning for future mining up to and beyond 2030.
“This allowed for the new fans to be cor-rectly sized for an ultimate duty as the mine goes deeper in coming years.”
Mr Mackay said the new ventilation fans are a significant investment in the operation of the CSA Mine.
“The investment to set up infrastructure that will support mining for another 10-15 years is a very positive sign demonstrating confidence in CSA’s capacity to continue to produce copper” he said
