S.W. Barrick & Sons is an affiliate of Aggregate Management, a collection of aggregate, asphalt, concrete and block companies in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, United States. In business since 1874, S.W. Barrick & Sons currently operates four quarries in Maryland, offering an extensive line of high-quality aggregates for the construction market.
Case Studies
Challenge
At its new Laurel Hill site in Woodsboro, Maryland, S.W. Barrick & Sons is processing sandstone for various construction-grade aggregate products. Operations Manager Randy Heckler said that although they analyzed the material ahead of developing the site, they were surprised to find the material contained an excess of difficult-to-remove fines that required a high volume of water to remove. All this water and material reduced the efficiency of the site’s existing sand screw washer.
“Even with all that water washing out,” explained Heckler, “we had a high 200 mesh, so we were battling the 200 while losing a lot of grit to the ponds.”
Heckler said they sampled the screw overflow and determined they had
recoverable stone material that they could be removing before it went to
the settling ponds.
Solution
S.W. Barrick & Sons contacted McLanahan through Paschal Associates, McLanahan’s dealer in the region, for a solution to recover some of the material it was losing to the ponds as well as to give the company the ability to add the recovered material back to its product while maintaining spec.
After sampling and analyzing the material overflowing the sand screw, McLanahan recommended its Scavenger System, which consists of a Sump, Pump and Separator™. The Separator™ is mounted above the discharge end of the sand screw washer. The overflow from the screw flows into the Sump, from where it is pumped up to the Separator™. The Separator™ then captures the product-sized material and discharges it onto the screw flights with the rest of the sand product for further dewatering and stockpiling.
The Sump was tailored specifically to the Laurel Hill site to slide underneath the existing dewatering screen to capture the water and any fine material that passes through the screen panels. This tailored design minimized Laurel Hill’s downtime during installation, saving approximately two weeks of total outage, according to Heckler.
“It was definitely a clean install. It was definitely a quick install. It was definitely an easy install. I think everything you see out there that’s painted red was some of the easiest stuff we worked with,” Heckler said, referencing the McLanahan Scavenger System with its characteristic McLanahan red paint color.
Results
The McLanahan Scavenger System is working well for S.W. Barrick & Sons, allowing the company to more than meet its sand recovery goals.
“It’s working fantastic, honestly,” Heckler said. “We hit it right off the bat. Even on day one, our samples were showing that we were saving 30-40% from what was going into the ponds, which upped our tons per hour on our sand product.”
With the McLanahan Scavenger System, Heckler said S.W. Barrick & Sons is adding between 20 and 30 tons an hour of material back in the product pile and still has an on-point gradation.
“It’s been a huge benefit to us because we’re able to reduce operating hours,” Heckler said. “It’s almost like a 15-20% decrease in operating hours needed for the asphalt sand, and then adding the concrete sand, which we did not previously have.”
Additionally, recovering this material reduces the grit headed to the settling ponds, which Site Manager Devin Miller said they had to muck out once a week prior to installing the McLanahan Scavenger System.
“With the McLanahan Scavenger System, we roughly muck once every three weeks, which cuts down on the manpower that can be utilized elsewhere,” Miller said.
Miller added that the system, which has been running for approximately 1,600 hours, has been a pleasure to operate.
“It’s user friendly,” he said. “You can make quick and easy adjustments on the fly for quality control purposes with the touch of a knob.”
Heckler is also happy with the McLanahan Scavenger System, but he’s even more pleased with the service and support he’s received from McLanahan from the beginning.
“What I like about McLanahan is they were definitely here from the get-go,” he said. “It was mostly people. We’ve got a lot of equipment out here, and what really matters is people and support more than anything.
Heckler added, “I’ve worked with McLanahan on at least three, four or five different sites. I’ve worked with McLanahan equipment that is probably twice as old as I am and still there running. Been happy with it. It’s local. It’s reliable, and we would buy again.”
