When a client came to RCR Mining Technologies with a problem which no existing feeder technology could solve, Head of Engineering Elia Khoury and his team didn’t settle for a compromise. They built the RCR Sealed Pan Feeder.
In my two decades as an engineer in bulk materials handling, I’ve sat across the table from a lot of mining customers, and the conversation was always the same.
Spillage was a constant battle, and while dribble conveyors are a solution for apron feeders, they are a maintenance headache that everyone had learned to live with. Spillage could result in components being buried in the material, resulting in accelerated wear and ongoing clean-up.
The frustrating part wasn’t that these problems existed, it was that the industry had quietly accepted them as an unavoidable cost of moving bulk material at scale. At RCR, we decided they weren’t.
Three proven technologies. One persistent gap.
For decades, some bulk materials handling operations have had three main feeder technologies to choose from: the apron feeder, belt feeder, and hybrid feeder.
The apron feeder is robust and built for coarse material, but its carrying surface is not sealed and results in carry-back which is not scrapable. This feeder technology can necessitate a dribble conveyor to manage the carry-back and spillage. An apron feeder with an integrated dribble conveyor also results in a taller height profile when compared to a belt feeder.
A belt feeder offers strong sealing and scraping capabilities, along with a lower profile, but its belt cover is vulnerable to damage from coarse or sharp material.
The hybrid feeder provides improved tensile capacity over the belt feeder due being chain and sprocket driven; however, its belt cover is also vulnerable to damage from coarse or sharp material.
These feeder types all have a genuine place in bulk material handling circuits, but none are the complete answer when you need robustness, a low profile, and a sealed and scrapable carrying surface all at once.
About 10 years ago, a client came to us with exactly that problem.
Their configuration couldn’t accommodate an apron feeder and dribble conveyor arrangement, and the coarse material characteristics made a belt cover a real risk.
There was no off-the-shelf solution. That’s the kind of problem our Principal Mechanical Design Engineer, Brian Norman, was driven to solve.
The secret is in the geometry
The answer, it turned out, came down to geometry. A traditional apron feeder cannot simply be sealed and scraped because of the way its chains, pans, and components are arranged.
The Sealed Pan Feeder required a fundamentally new geometry, one that seals the running surface between each pan, enables scraping at the discharge end to manage carry-back, and pushes the chain, rollers, sprockets and idlers outside the machine entirely, where they’re protected from fines and far more accessible for maintenance.
The carrying surface is cast manganese steel, not a belt cover, so there’s no compromise on durability under impact.
The result is a machine that delivers the robustness of an apron feeder and the sealing and scraping capabilities of a belt feeder, eliminating the dribble conveyor altogether.
When we tell customers that last part, the reaction is always the same: disbelief, then genuine excitement.
Proven in the field
Our first Sealed Pan Feeders went into service at Fortescue’s Christmas Creek iron ore operation, in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, after more than a decade of development, followed by the replacement of two existing apron feeders and dribble conveyors in a brownfields train unloader application.
We took their operational KPIs on board throughout the process which made a genuine difference and delivered real value. Spillage, carry-back and unplanned downtime all improved significantly.
We’ve also gone ahead and patented the Sealed Pan Feeder in Australia – it’s a genuine world-first.
The world is paying attention
At MINExpo 2024 in Las Vegas, we brought a full-scale RCR Sealed Pan Feeder to the show floor, running it forward and reverse in front of thousands of attendees. Even a competitor pulled us aside to say we had raised the bar in feeder technology.
The challenges customers described across the US and Canada were immediately familiar: spillage, carry-back, dribble conveyors. The same problems, the same frustrations – and the RCR feeder technology addresses them perfectly.
The North American market is substantially larger than Western Australia’s and the appetite for better feeder performance is strong.
We’ve been building relationships there since 2024, visiting sites and running live demonstrations across the US and in Canada.
For operators across North America wanting to know who we are, our track record with BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue will provide the answers.
What’s next
The Sealed Pan Feeder is one chapter in RCR’s longer story. With 50 years of bulk materials handling experience, we continue to look at where technology can improve reliability and uptime, including through smarter predictive maintenance solutions.
If you’re dealing with spillage, carry-back or dribble conveyor headaches, or simply looking for a feeder solution engineered to perform where others fall short, we’d love to talk.
Contact RCR Mining Technologies.
Author: Elia Khoury
Elia is the Head of Engineering at RCR Mining Technologies. Since joining the company in 2007, he has held numerous roles including Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, Assistant Project Manager of a major EPC project, and Engineering Manager. Elia holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering) (Hons) from the University of Western Australia and is a Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng) administered by Engineers Australia.
