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BUFFALO
Buffalo feeders, feeder breakers and sizers
High quality feeders, feeder breakers and sizers help materials-handling and processing operations increase productivity. Modular products and solutions ensure industry-leading efficiency and durability, running continues and at low operational costs.
Through the Buffalo product brand FLSmidth is the market leader in materials-handling solutions. All Buffalo solutions and products are engineered around a commonality pool of sub-systems and components. This modular structure provides customers with supreme productivity, a high degree of durability, and ease of maintenance benefits client operational costs.
During the R&D process with the development of new products or the upgrade of existing products, key clients will be invited to provide technical and process input, ensuring that the FLSmidth Buffalo product is developed around industry needs.
This unique and valuable process allows us to develop the Buffalo product brand for the materials-handling industry with a focus on market trends and market needs, and on delivering high productivity benefits for our customers.
Industry standard and benefits
Today, Buffalo products have become the industry standard because of our constant product development and innovation. Low maintenance requirements and cost effectiveness of our feeders and feeder breakers has made the Buffalo brand legendary.
Contrary to the more traditional flight bar conveyor system used in most chain feeder designs, Buffalo feeders utilises the unique Buffalo flightless conveyor chain arrangement. This has many advantages, e.g. longer chain life, better size control and the capacity to run either or both the dual conveyor systems.
Buffalo’s modular unit design provides the ability to cater for different discharge heights, and a variety of loading deck lengths, offering an excellent fit for purpose for any materials-handling application. Modularity also allows our feeders to be containerised and transported to any location in the world, improving product lead times.
FLSmidth Buffalo custom designs and builds feeders and feeder breakers according to customer-specific requirements for feed rate, product size, mobility, ancillary machinery and mining conditions.
Innovation
Our latest innovation, the Buffalo HAB feeder, is a hybrid belt/apron feeder with kicked neck section that delivers the advantages of both technologies. Additional benefits unique to the HAB Feeder include a low profile loading deck and different discharge heights.
The hybrid design significantly reduces wear, and makes this product ideal for feeding highly abrasive materials over the traditional chain scraper feeder design.
Industries and solutions
Buffalo solutions enhance productivity in the mining industry, as well as adjacent industries depending on efficient materials handling and processing.
Our solutions, equipment and products for the mining industry cover surface mining, underground mining, reclaim, stock yards, ROM, plants, sizing stations, traps and other applications. The Buffalo feeders and feeder breakers are offered in mobile and semi-mobile plug and play versions to optimise feeding throughout the mine.
- Case: FLSmidth develops feeder for big petroleum manufacturer in South Africa
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We executed one of these collaborative projects in partnership with a big petroleum manufacturer in South Africa. The client replaced their existing shuttle cars with larger 20 tonne units due to repeated market demands for increasing production tonnage in the underground mining sector. The client approached FLSmidth Buffalo to develop an underground feeder unit that could accommodate larger shuttle cars.
FLSmidth Buffalo succeeded in developing a “first of its kind” underground feeder as per the client’s request and consequently received mutable orders from the client, securing future business for years to come.
- Case: Black Wattle Colliery
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Black Wattle Colliery, an operation owned by Bisichi Mining PLC and Vunani Mining, required a robust solution for their run-of-mine (ROM) tip at their coal mining operation in South Africa. The mine plant required feeding and sizing of its ROM coal at 350 tph nominal capacity.
FLSmidth’s experts recommended installation of the following key equipment:
- Refurbished and upgraded modular FLSmidth reclaim feeder
- Modular FLSmidth Buffalo Sizer (reducing the ROM feed from 600mm to 280mm)
- 54 m (177 ft) FLSmidth Conveyor
The FLSmidth project team devised a way to reduce downtime during installation by utilizing the existing FLSmidth Buffalo feeder breakers while the project was under construction. The entire installation of new and upgraded equipment, from order placement to commissioning, took only four months.
Once production using the new equipment had begun, however, its high reliability along with reduced downtime downstream equipment made it an easy decision for the mine to decommission its old equipment.
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