Handling the future at Bulk26
Excitement is growing for BULK26, as the largest gathering of everything and everyone in bulk material draws closer.
Hawk Measurement Solutions is preparing for the event, readying its fibre optic sensing Praetorian Conveyor Health Monitoring System as a standout showcase.
Further bolstering its exhibition ranks will be the Gladiator Blocked Chute Detection System, designed to identify build-up before it occurs.
For Hawk, the pairing captures why BULK26 matters for the bulk handling supply chain: it’s a specialised forum where operational pain points can be discussed directly with the teams managing them on a daily basis.
“Last year, it was right up our alley. It’s in our backyard in Melbourne, so it’s easy for us to attend,” Hawk Measurement Solutions technical sales and product manager Mathew Cook said.
“It’s a pretty good bang for your buck in terms of the show itself.”
Cook believes the value of the event comes from the fact that it allows the right audience to find suppliers directly.
He said Hawk was “very happy” when one of its customers attended unexpectedly, reinforcing that the company was engaging the right market at the show.
“For us, it’s a marketing opportunity and the fact that bulk handling is a niche that we service across multiple aspects of our business,” Cook said. “It’s very specific, but it fits what we do.”
That fit is evident in the two systems Hawk plans to showcase.
“A lot of our other products work in bulk handling applications, but these two are unique to a certain extent, and no one else is doing conveyor monitoring like we are,” Cook said.
On the transfer and blockage monitoring side, Hawk’s microwave detection has become a benchmark offering, described as a “top-of-the-field” choice for capability.
Likewise, Praetorian addresses limitations in traditional conveyor inspections, where Hawk notes manual “belt walks” can be intermittent and subjective, allowing idlers to progress to “catastrophic failure conditions” between inspections.
“What that really is, is more of an issue in the reliability of the existing inspection method,” Cook said.
Praetorian is designed to address this issue by continuously operating on a 24–7 basis, trending idler condition over time.
“The system doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t get lazy, it doesn’t take days off,” Cook said.
Hawk describes Praetorian as a plant and site-wide “single solution” connecting an interrogator and processor unit to a fibre optic cable, using the fibre as a distributed sensing element without requiring in-field power or communications.
The interrogator sends pulses through the fibre and uses time-of-flight and vibration analysis to pinpoint events, presenting conveyor condition in a traffic-light format while supporting integration via standard Ethernet communications.
“Those belt walks are often done at 20km per hour, sticking your ear out the window and listening for a bad idler. It’s not an effective system,” Cook said.
Improvements in reliability are closely linked to safety, with failures extending beyond lost production.
“Chutes, when blocked, whatever is pouring material into the top of them is now pouring material over the sides,” Cook said.
“So if you’ve got an iron ore chute at 12,000 tonnes per hour, you’re now dropping 12,000 tonnes of stone onto the walkways below.”
On Gladiator, Cook said earlier-generation microwave systems could be fooled by reflections.
Hawk addressed this issue through “circular polarisation” to reject bounced signals, improving blockage certainty and sensitivity in heavy build-up conditions. The goal is earlier intervention, including communications options that can feed “block percentage” into programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and automate sprays.
Hawk sees BULK26 as a valuable platform where critical conversations around reliability and safety converge, bringing operators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and technology providers together to compare how predictive maintenance is evolving in real-world applications. This brings benefits to everyone in the industry.
As Cook put it, when Praetorian and Gladiator are used together, “you are just going to end up with a greater amount of uptime on those assets”.
“You’ll be pushing your availability in time and tonnage up, which ultimately is going to push down cost and drive up profitability and productivity,” he said.