Processes of mining, transportation and final consumption of coal all include transportation of coal on conveyor belts. Quite often this transportation is linked to risks of equipment breakages or breakdowns, caused by tramp metals in the transported material. Tramp metal can be occasional (scrapers, bore bits, etc.) or intentionally or negligently dropped by staff members (instruments, etc.).

Breakdowns of expensive equipment (crushers, mills, conveyors) can be prevented by magnetic separators, produced by Research & Production Company «ERGA», such as suspended magnetic separators SMPR & SMPA (manual cleaning system & self-cleaning correspondingly) which are installed above the conveyor belt, 300 mm. above the product burden. Ferrous metals are removed from the product burden by a powerful long-range magnetic field, when the product passes under the separator. Extracted metals are either held on a separator's sliding plate until cleaning procedure (SMPR model), or are removed automatically (SMPA model). One of the main advantages of the SMPR model is that those separators do not consume electric power, making the model indispensable for heavy-duty industrial tasks, where fire and explosion safety is essential.

Magnetic pulleys (SMB model) are installed instead of original conveyor's drive pulley. It is possible to produce a “twin-pulley” (exact copy of the original), to simplify installation.

We would like to emphasize that the above-mentioned separator models are fire and explosion-safe, which is very important for coal-mining applications, where methane and coal slack are a constant threat.

Long-term usage of those separators showed, that combined work of both suspended (SMPR, SMPA) and pulley (SMB) models guarantee maximum efficiency of removal of tramp metals from the material burden.