Yes I have. We have designed them to clean belts carrying alumina especially if they are non anti static belts that make it difficult to remove the alumina from the belt face. In such instances we have either incorporated it with a venturi suction system to take the dusty material away or coupled it to the baghouse collection system. It has worked extremely well.

We have also seen them used in the hard rock industry particularly at Argyle Diamonds but maintenance issues became a killer as water and fine water laden material can easily block the air outlets. I don't think the systems at Argyle are still in place but if they are I can dig up the company that designed these.

Finally we did quite a bit of experimentation with air knives on various ore types to work through cutting angles and efficiencies. We found that they were ineffective with any cohesive ores, reasonably effective on adhesive ores (generally water laden material) and good on free flowing material. The set up is critical as they can affect flow in the transfer chute and of course you have the perennial problem of an air source.

Cheers

Colin Benjamin

Gulf Conveyor Systems P/L ■

Dear

Yes I have an experiance with such air knives for cleaning of belt,recently i had installed Air Kinfe for cleaning of Petroluem coke handling belt at returen side near head drum which is working with Compressed Air ,unfortunatly the effeceancy is not satisfactory

regards ■

They can be extremely noisey. Dust is hard to contain. Cleaning is less efficient. ■

Yes,compressed air adjested to 5 bar,as our conver hoods are connected with veting bagfilters we are not facing dust emmission to out side but little noice will be their, ■

Our experience with air knife cleaners was with extremely dusty material. The cleaning was excellent and the dust reduction very, very good. It gets back to design and how you set them up. Crude systems are just as Larry Nordell says, noisy, inefficient and dusty. I have also seen where they were set up to clean material off belts in a diamond mine. Maintenance was an issue but they did remove wet sticky material very well. This system however required a lot of power so the cleaning system was expensive. A good air knife is not a cheap cleaning system but in the right application they can be the very best of solutions

Cheers

Colin Benjamin

Gulf Conveyor Systems P/L

www.conveyorsystemstechnology.com ■