Project details

Lafarge Canada Inc.’s Spy Hill aggregate plant is an automated high-capacity screening, crushing, and washing plant that can crush approximately 1,000 tons per hour and was approximately 700 tons per hour. As the prime engineering consultant, CWA was responsible for the civil, structural, mechanical, and electrical detailed design along with establishing and controlling the project budget and schedule.

Challenges

As the plant needed to be able to produce different products with variable gradation specifications, the plant had to be designed to be readily adaptable.

A labour and supplier shortage in Alberta at the time of the project created challenges for the project schedule and execution.

Solutions

To meet the various product requirements, CWA used process plant modelling software to develop a workable virtual process plant that modelled throughputs, product stockpiles, and waste. Based on the model, CWA developed detailed mechanical layouts for the plant including moveable and reversing conveyors, which provided the key aspects of the plant flexibility.

CWA was responsible for the detailed design of all conveyors and supporting structures, as well as the coordination of their fabrication and installation. The major plant areas included a primary screen tower, a primary and secondary crushing tower, a secondary screening tower, a wet screen tower, and a sand plant.

In addition to providing the detailed design of the electrical and control systems for the plant, CWA worked with Calgary’s power authority to bring power to the new plant site from their mainline power system.

To meet the project execution challenges and reduce the schedule, CWA took a modified turnkey delivery approach to fast-track the project, which was implemented as a design-build project with engineering overlapping construction activities.