Each "shot" lasts 0.3 seconds: capturing it required solving the structure 200,000 times per case (4.8 million solutions in total).
Minera San Cristóbal planned the installation of air cannons on Feeder 7 (the steel structure that feeds ore toward the processing plant), in order to dislodge the material that accumulates inside it. Before proceeding, we were commissioned to carry out the structural verification to ensure that the cannons' discharges (150-liter tanks at 100 PSI that expel air violently) would not compromise the integrity of the existing infrastructure.
The force of each discharge is an almost instantaneous impact: it reaches 8,300 N in barely a thousandth of a second and then dissipates over a span of 0.3 seconds. Capturing that transient phenomenon precisely required an advanced dynamic analysis with extremely fine time steps, on the order of five millionths of a second. That is why it was necessary to build a numerical model integrating both the steel structure and its foundations, to simulate the transmission of these high-frequency shock waves and evaluate the overall structural behavior under the direct impact.
A detailed finite element model of the entire infrastructure was built, including the hopper, the tray, the chute, the bin, the platform, the supports, the concrete tunnel beneath the Feeder and the air cannons themselves, integrating a total of 117,558 finite elements. With it, 24 dynamic discharge scenarios were simulated (individual shots, in pairs, and the simultaneous activation of all 16 cannons), solving the structural equations 200,000 times for each case. The analysis concluded that the demands on the structure are minimal, with a safety factor equal to or greater than 28 (far above the standard design value for steel, which is usually 2) and maximum displacements that do not exceed 0.02 mm. It was determined that the cannons could be installed in complete safety, and recommendations were delivered to optimize the supports, such as distributing the force of each impact over a minimum area equivalent to a 30 cm diameter circle and simplifying the existing auxiliary structure. With this high-precision study, Galindo Ingeniería provided the technical certainty to make the project viable, protecting the plant's assets and ensuring the continuity of the ore flow without risks of structural failure.
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