Salt mining ship example

Arab Potash Co., Ltd. built 1.2 million tons of potassium chloride plant on the southeast coast of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea brine is extracted through the Yantian Sunlight Carbide Mine to produce potassium chloride. The salt field is 1m deep and the carnallite layer is 0.3-0.5m thick.

The carnallite is harvested using a floating tracked salt mining ship made by Hansen Company (Fig. 1). The aircraft body is a box-shaped barge carrying the weight of most equipment on the aircraft. The walking device is composed of four crawler belts. The lifting and lowering of the crawler frame is controlled by a hydraulic cylinder, and the grounding pressure can be adjusted to be less than 0.05 MPa. The working speed is 0~222m/h. According to the reading instructions of the conveying slurry flowmeter and the density meter, the driving speed is adjusted by the control valve to meet the slurry flow and concentration requirements.

Figure 1 Floating track walking salt mining boat

The main working device of the salt mining vessel is the cutting head. It is similar to a spiral aggregate type shovel head. The carnallite ore is loosely collected and gathered in the middle of the shovel head. It is pumped by a salt slurry pump and pressurized and then transported through a floating pipe. The float pipe has a total length of 2100m and a pipe diameter of 300mm. The float pipe is supported on the float and connected by a hose. In order to reduce the swing of the floating pipe by the action of wind and waves, the anchor is used to stabilize the position of the floating pipe.

The salt mining vessel uses the direct excavation method to mine the ore layer, and the laser guidance makes the crawler track straight. The single stroke width is 10m and the production capacity is 310t/h. Three-shift work system, working for 300 days a year.

The Jordanian Potash Company’s Dead Sea project has a total investment of US$425 million. Among them, Yantian infrastructure construction fee is 120 million US dollars, accounting for 28.24% of the total investment, unit investment is 1.2 million US dollars / km ² , and the construction period is 10 years. The processing plant invested 110 million US dollars, accounting for 26% of the total investment, and the unit investment was 91.67 US dollars / ton. The unit investment for the entire project is $354/ton.