Read, Swatman & Voigt (RSV) ranks as one of South Africa’s premier consulting engineers and project managers serving the mining industry and employs well over 500 people directly (and many more, if linked enterprises such as K’Enyuka and RSV ENCO Consulting are taken into account). Providing a core of expert drafting and design skills to the entire group is what RSV calls its engineering and technology cluster- or E&T, for short. Modern Mining recently spoke to Jannie Mostert, who manages the commercial aspects of the cluster, to learn more about the services it offers. He says E&T, effectively RSV’s design arm, is now marketing itself aggressively to achieve a higher profile within the mining and other markets.

Although the engineering and technology cluster was established just over a year ago, the skills it contains are obviously not new to the group. “Since its founding nearly 20 years ago, RSV has always been able to offer its clients in-house drafting and design skills of considerable sophistication – without them, it would not have been able to grow to where it is today,” says Mostert. “All that we did when we established the cluster was to concentrate these skills within a single entity, which makes for a sharper focus and greater efficiency. It also allows RSV to market E&T’s expertise more broadly. Previously the resources that now reside within the cluster were primarily used by other divisions of the group or by sister enterprises. Now E&T can take on external contracts on its own behalf.”

He adds that E&T is not wedded to the mining field. “The RSV name, of course, is closely associated with the mining industry and almost certainly the bulk of E&T’s work will continue to come from mining clients,” he says. “But there is no reason why our skills – which essentially cover civil, structural and mechanical engineering – cannot be utilised by other sectors of industry. For example, we are more than capable of designing most commercial structures – factories, offices and the like. We are also particularly expert at designing for vibrating machinery, where special foundations and other measures might be required. We already do this for the mining industry but many other industries have similar requirements.”

Mostert says that E&T, which is based at RSV’s headquarters in Johannesburg’s CBD, now consists of 30 people, several of them professional engineers. The cluster has access to the latest technology in terms of design and drafting software and also controls what RSV calls its ‘virtual office’, which is a section of the group which specialises in carrying out design work remotely. Mostert reports to Robin Bremner, who is CEO of RSV’s Strategic Business and Global Technology Division.

Mostert himself has been with RSV for about three years after a career spanning over 40 years with Anglo American, AngloGold Ashanti and Shaft Sinkers. A professional engineer with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, he has experience of most sides of the mining industry but has particular expertise in shaft sinking. Not only was he Technical Director of Shaft Sinkers but, prior to that, was closely associated with the sinking of many of AngloGold Ashanti’s Free State shafts.

He says that while E&T remains busy, it has – along with the rest of RSV and indeed the mining sector generally – felt the effects of the recession that has had mining in its grip over the past year. “The problem we have at the moment is not so much a lack of work but a lack of long-term work,” he observes. “We have sufficient shorter assignments to keep us very active but it would be great if some of the bigger projects that were on the drawing boards prior to the commodities crash were to be reactivated by the mining houses.”

One niche area that is providing a growing amount of business to E&T is the checking of structures – shafts, headgears and the structures within plant areas – to ensure that their structural and mechanical integrity is intact and their safety is not compromised. “New legislation makes these types of checks compulsory and we have picked up a number of contracts in this area,” says Mostert. “For example, we’ve just signed a contract with AngloGold Ashanti to do structural checks at a number of their gold mines in South Africa.”

Current projects which E&T is working on include the Karee 3 and 4 shafts for Lonmin and Impala Platinum’s No 16 shaft. E&T’s work on these projects is being undertaken on behalf of RSV’s project’s arm and includes the design of shaft steelwork as well as underground infrastructure such as conveyors, pump stations and loading stations.

Perhaps the classic example of the skills that E&T can bring to a project is, in Mostert’s view, its work on Resolution Copper’s No 10 shaft headframe (or headgear, to use the more common South African usage) near Phoenix, Arizona in the US. Resolution Copper, owned by Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, will sink the No 10 shaft to a depth of just over 2 km for exploration purposes. It will access a newly discovered deposit, which, according to Resolution, “may be one of the largest copper resources ever found in North America”. Resolution Copper has already completed sufficient drilling on the deposit to report an inferred resource of 1,34 billion tons, containing 1,51 % copper and 0,040 % molybdenum.

The headframe was completed – ahead of schedule and with no lost time injuries – in March this year at a cost of US$4.83 million. A steel structure, it has a height of 43,5 m and incorporates 509 tonnes of steel. The client requested that the design should allow for the collar area to be kept unhindered and clear of structural members and that it should also enable construction of the collar and sinking of the shaft to be started independently of the construction of the headframe and its foundations. Another requirement was that the structure be designed to facilitate dismantling (with a view to possibly reusing it on future shaft-sinking projects). A steel A-frame structure was the obvious choice to meet all these requirements.

Boxed section members were used for the main structural elements to eliminate the need for vertical bracing while the A-frame legs are splayed outwards in both directions to provide the stability of the structure. These legs give the headframe a “simplistic and clean appearance”, says Mostert.

While RSV was responsible for the design, the steel fabricator and erector was Schuff Steel while Sundt Construction was awarded the civils contract for the headframe foundation. RSV liaised closely with both these Arizona-based companies, who both proved to be exceptionally competent.

Says Mostert: “The No 10 shaft headframe project not only demonstrates that E&T is capable of highly innovative design work but also proves that it is able to efficiently execute design work for projects that can be located anywhere in the world. Our ‘virtual office’ was in fact established specifically for this project and the concept worked very well indeed.” He adds that another challenge that was successfully met was the requirement that all designs and drawing be prepared using imperial measurements and in accordance with American structural steel and reinforcing standards and design codes.

Although the primary means of communication was e-mail, RSV and the project team in Arizona used a software tool, Bentley ProjectWise, for drawing and document control. This software allowed access globally to information on a common server. Apart from the communication network established between RSV and Resolution Copper, a similar network had to be established between RSV and the steel erector in Phoenix to facilitate the transfer of drawings and correspondence as the detailed shop drawings were prepared and fabrication progressed.

Mostert notes that the ongoing development of the Resolution Copper mine offers the prospect of additional assignments for E&T. “The project is huge and we hope that the work that we have already carried out on the headframe – which the client is very happy with – will lead to additional contracts.”

Summing up, Mostert says that he sees a bright future for E&T. “Our aim is to grow at a rate of about 20 % a year. Our first year as an independent entity within RSV has largely coincided with the recession in mining so we have not achieved this in our first 12 months of operation but we do believe the target is realistic over the medium to longer term. Already we are seeing signs of an upturn in the mining market and we are anticipating a healthy order book for E&T in 2010.”

Report by Arthur Tassell