Weba chute redesign at Sierra Leone iron ore plant: screening lessons for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
Engineered chute redesign by Weba Chute Systems at a Sierra Leone iron ore wet plant is tackling chronic screening inefficiencies linked to problematic transfer points. Technical Director Dewald Tintinger reports that the custom chute geometry was re-engineered specifically for wet, fine ore conditions, improving material presentation to the screens and reducing blockages and spillage. For plant engineers, the project shows the value of site-specific chute design in stabilising feed conditions, protecting screen media and cutting unplanned maintenance on wet processing circuits.
Technical Brief
- Weba redesigned the transfer chutes specifically for the mine’s wet plant, not the dry circuit.
- Geometry was engineered for fine, wet iron ore, rather than the coarser dry bulk they usually handle.
- Tintinger notes the solution was developed from on-site diagnostics of the existing transfer point behaviour.
- Custom chute internals were configured to manage slurry-like flow regimes instead of predominantly granular flow.
- Impact conditions at the receiving conveyor were altered to reduce turbulence before material reached the screening area.
- Flow control features were tuned to maintain a consistent bed depth across the full screen width.
- Wear-lining selection and layout were adapted for continuous wet abrasion rather than intermittent dry impact.
- Project illustrates that dry bulk chute design experience can be transferred to wet processing only with re-engineered flow control.
Our Take
Iron ore pieces in our database increasingly highlight bottlenecks in materials handling rather than in primary crushing or beneficiation, so a chute redesign at a Sierra Leone plant signals where operators now see the quickest reliability gains for brownfield upgrades.
Sierra Leone appears far less often in our mining project coverage than West African peers such as Guinea or Mauritania, which suggests that incremental plant-optimisation work like this may be a lower-risk way for service suppliers to build a footprint ahead of any larger iron ore expansions.
Weba Chute Systems shows up mainly in product-tagged items rather than large greenfield project announcements in our database, indicating its commercial strategy is still centred on retrofit and debottlenecking work where payback is driven by reduced spillage and wear rather than headline capacity additions.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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