28/05/2026
Another milestone for CST in North America.
CST has completed a belt scale installation at a coal operation in North America, delivering a solution engineered to meet the site's material blending requirements and give them the measurement accuracy needed to blend coal grades with commercial confidence.
Led by Alastair Boyd, General Manager; Stan Roussell, Senior Business Development Manager; and Abdel Bouger, Supervisor, the project involved multiple site visits and a thorough collaborative process built on transparency and honesty that included explaining design decisions, working through the application constraints and ensuring the customer understood exactly what the new system would deliver.
The first step was an honest conversation about what the existing system was actually delivering and why. The site believed their existing legacy system was already performing to ±0.25% accuracy. In reality, their scales were operating somewhere between 9% and 16% out, affecting every blending decision and revenue calculation being made on that data. The site's original tail pulley tachometer was also a significant contributor to their accuracy problem. Many operations focus on the weigh frame while underestimating the tacho, but mathematically, a 1% tachometer error produces a 1% error in total measurement.
CST's solution centred on upgrading from a four-idler configuration to a five-idler zero deflection weigh frame, reducing weight-related measurement issues, and replacing the tachometer with a TD Micronic unit capable of supporting the required accuracy. A further factor, that the site's reclaimer introduces inherent measurement error when an inclinometer is added, had not previously been explained to the customer. Based on CST's calculations, the achievable accuracy for this application was ±0.35%, with a guaranteed accuracy of ±0.5%.
The result is a weighing system the site can rely on, with measurement integrity that gives their team the confidence to make coal blending decisions based on verified numbers. As demand for transparency and auditability grows across bulk material handling, CST continues to deliver belt scales engineered to maintain control and build trust, from the first tonne to the last.
Do you know how accurate your belt scales really are? Let’s find out https://tinyurl.com/bweu6r3y
