When cooling falls short, production pays the price
In mining & minerals processing, the cooling system often sets the ceiling on what the process can achieve, the same as any other piece of production equipment. When cooling performance drops, the cost shows up in tonnes, recovery and availability and is not just a temperature alarm or in a maintenance report.
Yet most sites still treat cooling as a supporting service rather than a core part of the production system.
NEXT Cooling managing director Roger Rusch says most mine sites still make that mistake, treating cooling as a utility rather than a production asset.
“Cooling is not a utility. It is a production asset,” he said.
“When a cooling tower is two degrees off from its design approach it shows as a throughput shortfall resulting in lost revenues.”
A cooling system deserves the same engineering discipline as any other production-critical asset, and its performance should be judged by the production outcomes it enables.
NEXT Cooling Australia, formerly IWC Australasia, designs, makes, erects, commissions and maintains industrial scale cooling systems including cooling towers and bulk air coolers.
All of this is done in-house or subcontracted under guarantee and acceptance tests, so accountability stays with one NEXT Cooling: from the thermal design to the materials chosen for the application, not the lowest upfront cost.
NEXT Cooling has decades of experience in deep-level mining cooling, covering bulk air cooling, mine refrigeration and solution & Slurry applications. Few suppliers in the Australian market can say the same.
Solution and slurry cooling towers.
These cooling towers cool the process liquor directly, including pregnant leach solutions, electrolyte, bio-oxidation circuit liquor, acid plant duty, autoclave duty and leach circuit duty. A hot, dirty, chemically aggressive stream is cooled with no heat exchanger in the flow path, and the cooling tower has no fill pack, so nothing fouls, scales or blocks.
Bulk air coolers and mine refrigeration heat rejection.
Bulk air coolers provide chilled air into an underground mine through the ventilation system, while the associated cooling towers and pre-cooling towers reject heat from the refrigeration plant. This equipment keeps deep-level work faces safe and legally compliant. It also protects production when high rock temperatures and high ambient conditions would otherwise cut permitted work hours or crew numbers.
“On deep level mining Bulk Air Coolers are essential to reducing the temperature working environment to a safe level for human exposure,” Mr Rusch said.
Aftermarket performance recovery on installed towers.
This covers fill replacement, drift eliminator replacement, mechanical equipment overhaul, structural condition assessment and thermal performance audits. Most cooling towers on Australian mine sites fall short of their design duty, and operators often don’t know by how much. NEXT Cooling runs an audit to measure exactly how far the equipment is missing its targets.
Replacing components usually recovers that duty for a fraction of the cost of a new tower, and the work fits into a normal shutdown.
Complete systems
NEXT Cooling also delivers complete systems on an EPC basis. That means the whole cooling circuit, including cooling towers, pumps, pipework, filtration, water treatment, controls, electrical and civils, is engineered, procured and constructed under one contract. Bulk air-cooling packages are handled on the same terms, including refrigeration machines and condenser cooling.
Buy a cooling tower on its own and you get a guarantee on a cooling tower, but the pump curve, the pipework losses and the control philosophy remain your problem, along with the argument about whose fault it is when the circuit underperforms.
If you don’t know how your cooling towers are performing against their design duty, ask NEXT Cooling for a thermal performance audit.