CFlo in the UK and Ireland

Five platforms cover the range. Each is a factory-assembled modular plant that ships in standard containers and commissions on a prepared pad rather than being built up on site. Three of them have pages written for UK feeds, standards and site conditions, which apply equally on Irish sites.

• Combo for UK and Irish quarries: the sand washing plant, taking crushed rock fines, quarry scalpings or as-dug sand and gravel to washed concreting sand and clean graded aggregate at up to 350 tonnes per hour on one chassis, with up to 95% of process water recycled.
• Micrograder for silica sand, china clay and foundry sand: the specification plant for the precision end of the market, grading to a narrow band with attrition scrubbing, precision fine screens, spiral gravity concentrators and upward-flow classification, and recovering the by-product sand as a saleable product.
• Reurban for construction and demolition waste: the modular plant that washes rubble, excavation spoil, incinerated bottom ash and clay-bound quarry by-product into washed recycled sand and graded aggregate, with wood, plastic and other lightweights removed.
• Oremax: the ore washing and beneficiation plant, proven on iron ore, limestone, chromite, quartz, bauxite, phosphate and manganese, and on slimes recovered from tailings.
• Aerograder: the dry air classifier, cutting fines from a dry feed below 5 mm with no process water, no cyclones and no baghouse.

Two process modules come with every wet plant as standard. The Hydromax high-rate thickener returns the great majority of the process water to the plant, and the Easysettle sludge bay manager rigidifies tailings at the point of disposal so they release their water at once and dry to a trafficable cake, which keeps the lagoon footprint small; where a site has no room for lagoons, mechanical dewatering is specified instead. Plants for the United Kingdom and Ireland are CE and UKCA marked, including the PLC control panels CFlo designs and builds itself. The Combo is patented in the United Kingdom (GB 2552042 B) and its design is registered in the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Glass sand, foundry sand, filtration media and china clay are a specification discipline rather than a washing job: the product has to land inside a narrow grading band with iron and the fine fraction under control. The Micrograder does that with attrition scrubbing to lift coatings off the grain, precision fine screens to hold the top of the gradation, spiral gravity concentrators to take out heavy minerals and iron-bearing grains without reagents, and upward-flow classification to place the fine cut. At Chu Lai in Vietnam two Micrograder lines take a feed of about 98.5% silicon dioxide to float glass sand above 99.3%, with iron oxide cut from roughly 0.5% to below 0.05%, on an entirely gravity-based circuit with roughly 95% water recovery. The same plant recovers, as a saleable product, the sand that a china clay or industrial sand operation would otherwise send to waste. At Bhuj in Gujarat a Micrograder raised china clay recovery fivefold for Suraj Minerals and made glass-grade sand from the by-product.

CFlo Europe Limited covers the whole island from Belfast, so an operator in the Republic of Ireland deals with the same engineers as one in Northern Ireland or Great Britain, and the whole island is within a day's drive of Belfast. Irish concrete and aggregate specifications sit on the same European standards, I.S. EN 12620 and I.S. EN 13242, and plants for the Republic are CE marked for the European Union. The feeds are familiar too: where the feed is as-dug sand and gravel, the Combo takes it with clay and silt through it to washed concreting sand and clean graded stone as separate products, and on a crushed rock site it washes the fines the crusher already makes. The EU trade mark and the EU registered design cover the Republic.

No plant is engineered from a catalogue. Sizing starts with a Sample Study of your own material at CFlo's pilot plant and laboratory at Howrah, a DSIR-recognised in-house R&D unit: usually a review of your existing gradation data, then a 20 kg bench sample by courier, and a pilot sample only if the bench result justifies it. The report gives grades and yields against the standard the product will be sold on, BS EN 12620 or BS EN 13242, with washed sand also run in concrete. On a UK or Irish site the part that saves the programme is Pre-Engineering: planning and permitting take as long as they take, and the plant is designed while they run, so manufacture starts the day consent lands. The Sample Study page sets out the programme, the timings and how samples travel. Where capital is the constraint, CFlo also offers equipment leasing or pay-per-tonne tolling.

A representative sample or a recent gradation of the feed, its clay and silt content, the moisture as it arrives, the specification the product has to meet, the tonnes per hour you want to produce and how much water the site has. If you already sell scalpings or as-dug material, the price you get for it is useful too, because it is the number the washed product has to beat. Send it through the form above or contact CFlo Europe Limited, and we will scope the Sample Study with you before you ship anything.