AVI-GmbH in Guinea

Our project engineer, Martin Bensing, is currently working on a project in Kamsar – a port city in Guinea. Here, TAKRAF, a long-standing Leipzig-based company, is building a handling facility for aluminum ore (bauxite). Together with our partner Proplan from Schwarze Pumpe, we work for Schneider Electric Deutschland GmbH on electrical engineering for the project. Since Guinea has the second largest bauxite deposits worldwide, the handling capacity of the existing port facility in Kamsar is to be doubled.

The installation includes the unloading of the wagons arriving from the mines, the transport, drying, storage and loading of the bauxite. Due to increasing demand from customers, the government-owned company CBG (Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée), which promotes and sells the largest share of aluminum ore (bauxite), wants to increase the capacity and performance of the existing plant. This project is titled “CBG Expansion Project”. The task of the company AVI GmbH is to create the software of the four programmable logic controllers, to work out the hardware planning, to supply the SPS cabinets and to take over the commissioning of the software.

A particular challenge of this project is the tropical climate and the high dust load during the dry season as well as extreme rain showers during the rainy season. These had to be taken into account in the planning and complicate the commissioning, which runs since April 2018.