CFlo in Australia

CFlo sells through Certified Partners, and in Australia that means an Australian Certified Partner that puts sales and service inside your own market, with CFlo's engineering behind it. Oceania sits in the same territory as the UK and Europe, so the CFlo Europe Limited team in Belfast that runs UK projects is the team behind Australian ones. Enquiries reach the sales desk through CFlo Oceania, and a regional specialist gets back to you, usually within one business day.

Two services support an Australian project: the Sample Study at CFlo's lab in India, which every plant starts with, and Pre-Engineering, which is optional and follows if the numbers work.

Sample Study & Interpretation. Feed gradation, clay content, moisture and mineralogy decide the plant, so material goes to CFlo's DSIR-accredited lab before anything is designed. The lab runs pilot bench and pilot units on bulk samples, configured as a circuit rather than as jar tests, from 20 kg for a short bench programme up to 2500 kg for a full pilot campaign, and reports recovered products, grades and yields against the specification you sell into, together with a mass balance, water and polymer consumption and a recommended flowsheet. Washed sand is also run in concrete for workability, water demand and strength, so what comes back is a product result. Reports take one to two weeks for a short programme and up to twenty to twenty-four weeks for an extensive one, measured from receipt of the sample. Samples travel on a DDP basis with the paperwork agreed first, and how the sample is taken matters as much as how much you send, so it is worth a conversation with the sales desk before anything ships. The Sample Study page sets out the programme.

Pre-Engineering. If the numbers work, Pre-Engineering turns the report into a complete engineering package designed against your feed: process flow, mass and water balance, sized equipment list, general arrangement, civil and structural drawings and utility schedules, over twelve weeks in four phases. It runs in parallel with your financial clearance rather than after it, against an invoiced fee, so manufacture starts when the supply contract is placed rather than after a further twelve weeks of design.

Proppant is a specification product: at least 90% of the sample between the designating sieves, no more than 0.1% coarser than the top sieve and no more than 1% finer than the bottom one, with sphericity, roundness, crush resistance, turbidity and acid solubility limits on top. The route follows the material. Run-of-pit sand carrying silt and surface coatings, as at Darwin, is a wet duty for the Micrograder. A feed that arrives dry and clean and needs only a bottom-end cut is a dry duty for the Aerograder, and an enclosed crusher-to-classifier circuit or an arid site gives year-round dry feed.

The dry route has measured results behind it. In Abu Dhabi four Aerograder units of 280 tonnes per hour combined capacity grade local dune sand to frac specification for a major oil and gas services operator. Across a July 2026 verification campaign at 70 tonnes per hour per unit, the graded product averaged 0.83% minus 200 mesh against a 1% specification ceiling, with about 90% mass yield and roughly 94% recovery of the plus 140 mesh coarse fraction, using no process water at all.

Glass and other silica grades are the same discipline with a different end product. At Chu Lai in Vietnam two 100 tonnes per hour Micrograder F70D lines take a feed of about 98.5% silicon dioxide and roughly 0.5% iron oxide to float glass sand above 99.3% silicon dioxide with iron oxide below 0.05%, a ten-fold reduction, at about 71% product yield and roughly 95% water recovery, on an entirely gravity-based circuit with no chemical reagents. See silica and glass sand and frac sand and proppant.

Marine sand is well graded, rounded and free of organic contaminants, and its shell and chloride content are what keep it out of concrete. CFlo plants apply wet sizing, attrition scrubbing, classification and washing to bring the chloride down to the level the concrete standard allows, producing concrete and plaster sand. Screenmax precision fine screens hold the top of the gradation and dewater on the same deck, and the Vertimax upward-flow classifier makes the mid-range cut while floating shell fragments and organic matter off the top. Both are built into the Micrograder and are also supplied on their own. Water recovery is lower than on a freshwater circuit, because chloride builds up in the wash water and part of it has to be rejected, and washing circuits can be configured to run on seawater where fresh water is scarce.

Material from maintenance dredging of ports and channels, and from desilting dams and reservoirs, is sand that a river or the sea sorted: fine, wet and in large volume. CFlo does not carry out the dredging. It processes what comes out, shore-based or barge-mounted and fed directly from dredge pumps, into engineered sand for concrete, reclamation and fill, with the ultrafines concentrated and dewatered for low-cost disposal. CFlo wet processing plants are engineered for that fine, high-moisture feed. See marine sand, beach sand and desilting and dredged material.

Every tonne in a tailings dam has already been drilled, blasted, hauled, crushed and processed, and what separated it from product was a grade cut or a particle size the circuit could not hold. CFlo builds circuits that recover the saleable mineral still in slimes and tailings and dewater what is genuinely waste, under one contract. At SAIL's Kiriburu iron ore mine, slime discarded since the 1960s is now lifted from 54–55% Fe to a product above 61% Fe by an Oremax slime beneficiation system, with the reject routed to the mine's existing tailings thickener.

Water is the other half. Hydromax high-rate thickeners return the great majority of the process water to the plant, Easysettle rigidifies the reject at the point of disposal so it releases its water immediately and dries to a trafficable cake, and filter presses are supplied where cake moisture has to be low or the reject has to be trucked. Both process modules bolt onto an existing wash plant as well as coming as standard on a new one, so an open-loop plant losing water to ponds can be closed without being replaced. Easysettle is proven on iron ore, coal, alumina, mineral sands, gold, copper and manufactured sand. See tailings and slimes and water management.

The question an Australian operator weighs with any imported plant is who answers when a classifier drifts out of specification. In Australia the plant is sold and supported by an Australian Certified Partner, with CFlo's engineering behind it and the Customer Care Desk for troubleshooting, genuine parts and service visits. Oceania sits in the same territory as the UK and Europe, so the people delivering the Darwin plant are the people who would deliver yours. Enquiries go to CFlo Oceania on +61 870 925 996 or [email protected], or through the contact page, and a regional specialist gets back to you, usually within one business day.