Vale is a global leader in the mining of Iron Ore, Nickel, and Copper. A vertically integrated company led by continuous research and development in mining technologies, Vale has committed extensively to sustainability and environmental initiatives to minimize its impact on the natural world. The engineers in the Product Development division at Vale have been using engineering simulation to design, optimize, and test the performance of mining equipment. Mining machinery is subject to constant loads and harsh weather conditions and must be robust, durable, and minimally maintained. Adding these qualities in at the design stage requires early and broad use of simulation for structural/mechanical assessment. Engineers in Product Development teams at Vale use SimScale.
Vinícius Gonçalves is a senior engineer at Vale and uses SimScale to verify product life and its reliability to achieve a plateau of mean time to failure. The product reliability team is made of six professionals and one of their core activities is to employ accelerated lifetime tests and lifetime data analysis to verify if a new solution has the operational life required. Most of the simulations in the reliability team are related to FEA, with the R&D team making increasing use of the electromagnetics (EM) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers integrated into SimScale. The team uses an export from Autodesk Inventor, using additional tools such as SpaceClaim to clean up and prepare the geometry for simulation.
In reliability engineering, the team looks particularly at three key outputs that need constant evaluation and analysis: structural and mechanical stress related to nominal loading (Product level), nominal + safety factors (Project level), and destruction (limits to avoid). Accelerated testing for stress is always undertaken at the project level, meaning the team needs to simulate multiple product configurations to stay within safety operational limits for obtaining approved lifetime use data.
This is where SimScale comes in, particularly with the capability to run dozens of simulations in parallel, each with different parameters, whether that’s a variation in CAD geometry, ambient conditions, or applied loads. The purpose of all these simulations is to quickly converge on a physical design that can be used in laboratory bench tests. These physical prototypes are costly and time-consuming to fabricate, and by applying simulation earlier in the design process, the team can reduce the number of physical models.
“SimScale helps me in the daily routine of product design for mining industrial equipment, evaluating dangerous harmonic frequencies and avoiding resonance through modal and harmonic features, for example. We extensively use the FEA structural evaluation solver to find tradeoffs between product cost, performance, and durability. Mining can be dangerous and our job in the Reliability engineering team is to mitigate risk in the product development cycle.”
Vinícius Gonçalves
Senior Engineer at Vale
The equipment shown below is a Magnetic Separator, applied using Fines Dry Magnetic Separation technology (FDMS), developed by the Vale Technological Center of Sustainable Solutions. This technology concentrates iron ore in the fine fraction through the use of permanent magnetic separators.
Key points of this technology are:
A recent example of using FEA was the design and testing of the conveyor belt that sits inside the magnetic separator equipment and, more largely, a magnetic separator testing plant. The model applied fixed and elastic supports with downward loads simulating various quantities of dry-bulk mined ore. In this example, the team used the traction boundary condition to simulate the effects of frictional loads, which is a type of surface load boundary condition, as a distributed load per unit area applied on a face (the conveyor belt). It is useful to model the loads applied through the surface in contact with fluids or other solids, where the direction of application of the load is known beforehand, and the simulation gives resultant force magnitude and direction, including displacement (see images below).
“SimScale is a fast and user-friendly simulation software, the GUI is really simple and easy to be self-implemented even, while it took a week to get the same result with a concurrent tool. They absolutely have the best customer support, completely dedicated, super-fast and efficient among all simulation softwares we have used in the past. Post processing is really great for industrial/large simulation cases, giving the possibility to make design decisions anywhere, anytime with no special hardware requirements. I have been using SimScale in my product development routine (weekly) and it has been a game changer in critical design decisions where industrial equipment is used in large scale industrial operations.”
Vinícius Gonçalves
Senior Engineer at Vale
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