Weir Minerals expands its role as a total process partner in comminution and beyond

We are pleased that Weir Minerals, who sponsored Comminution '25, will be sponsoring Comminution '27 in 18 months time. The company has come a long way over the last 20 years, when it was best known for slurry-handling equipment, with hydrocyclones, pumps, and valves its core offerings.

Weir marketing their hydrocyclones at Hydrocyclones '03 in Cape Town

The company has significantly broadened into comminution equipment over the past decade and now positions itself as a "total process partner" across the entire minerals processing flowsheet, including comminution, classification, transport, and tailings management. Weir has invested heavily in, and now manufactures or supports, several categories of comminution machinery.

Weir’s Enduron® High Pressure Grinding Rolls (HPGR) line is central to its sustainability push, marketed as using up to 40% less energy than traditional grinding mills. To complement its Enduron® range of HPGRs, Weir has developed a robust range of crushers and screens under the same premium brand, now further strengthened by its in-house screening media. Weir’s large Enduron Elite double-deck banana screens have been in high demand, and will soon be produced at the company’s Alrode facility south of Johannesburg.

Large vibrating screens are vital to complement large capacity crushing plants and HPGR circuits and the Enduron Elite range is playing an important role in hard rock mining developments throughout Africa.

The latest generation of Weir’s Enduron cone crushers and jaw crushers has also just been introduced.

A key factor behind the success of Enduron HPGRs and the complementary crushers and screens in the circuit has been the rising cost of electricity, affecting not only South Africa but many other countries in Africa. Mines are adopting HPGR circuits as an energy efficient alternative to the traditional semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mill circuits.

At Comminution '25 we were pleased to hear that the company has developed a new Process and Applications Academy, a training program designed to give graduates technical insights into processing equipment. 

The academy aims to impart essential technical knowledge to recent university graduates, ensuring they are prepared for their professional responsibilities. It is designed for graduate process engineers, mechanical engineers, metallurgists and chemical engineers. The inaugural academy also welcomed graduates in electrical and civil engineering, thereby remaining open to all graduates nominated by their respective line managers.

At the inaugural training session, the academy emphasised essential concepts, selection criteria and troubleshooting techniques, with a particular focus on comminution, slurry and dewatering pumps, wear-resistant products, valves and cyclone simulations. Additionally, the course addressed the integration of artificial intelligence into these processes, which is bringing together equipment expertise, metallurgy, and intelligent solutions to optimise entire circuits, not just machines. From real-time digital twins to predictive maintenance and mine-to-mill feedback loops, Weir's vision is helping reshape mining operations and we hope to see the company involved not only in Comminution '27 but also in MEI's inaugural conference, AI in Mineral Processing '27, which follows 2 months later in Cape Town.

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