14 B ULK D ISTRIBUTOR
Sector Focus: Minerals
July/August 2018
Qube bags
‘em up for
Cristal
THE QUICKLY
CLEANED AND
MAINTAINED
ISO TANK
CONTAINER
JUMPS OVER
THE LAZY
DOG.
COME AND
SEE!
An Australian logistics firm fills up to 10 bulk bags
an hour for an abrasive minerals customer
Q
ube Bulk, a division of Australia’s largest
provider of import and export logistics
services, manages more than 20 million
tonnes of bulk product shipments each year.
Services now includes filling of bulk bags with
three abrasive mineral sands for Cristal Mining
Australia, Ltd using a Flexicon bulk bag filling
system.
Cristal Mining produces and sells products
derived from mineral sands deposits. The main
products sold are rutile, leucoxene, ilmenite and
zircon. When Cristal decommissioned its in-house
bagging operation, Qube Bulk’s Picton, Western
Australia facility seized the opportunity to improve
bagging of the sands by devising a bulk bag filling
solution in concert with Flexicon Corporation
(Australia).
The result is a mobile system that fills up to 80
bulk bags, or 160,000 kg, with the abrasive
materials per eight hour shift.
S
FIND U
HERE
GERMANY: HUERTH. STADE.
SPAIN: ZARAGOZA.
UAE: DUBAI.
TALKE.COM/CLEANING
The filled bag and pallet move
out on the roller conveyor and are
removed for shipment
Bulk truck shipments from Cristal’s mineral
separation plant are delivered to storage sheds at
Qube Bulk’s Picton facility. With limited lead time
for outgoing orders, productivity is key to the bulk
bagging process, according to Jos Pascoe, Qube
Bulk regional manager.
“Often, due to market situations, we receive
orders fairly late and need to bag the product in a
short time span to get the shipping containers
loaded with bulk bags and to the port on
schedule,” he says. “The need to respond to
orders for any combination of the three materials
stored in different sheds demanded a mobile
solution.”
Flexicon proposed a skid-mounted mobile filling
station having a 2.5 cbm capacity hopper and a
220mm diameter, 3m long rigid tube screw
conveyor moving materials to the bulk bag fill
head. It delivers 20 cbm per hour, filling bulk bags
weighing 1,000kg or 2,000kg. The skid measures