Every piece of mining equipment is only as reliable as its weakest component. That tends not to be the big visible parts: the drive systems, the structural members, the hydraulics that everyone can see and measure. It tends to be the seals, liners, wear pads, vibration isolators, and custom polymer components that nobody thinks about until they fail.
When they do fail in a remote location, the conversation quickly becomes about lead times. A replacement part sourced from an overseas manufacturer can take weeks. Each day of downtime has a cost, and in high-throughput mining operations, that cost accumulates fast.
Romar Engineering, a Sydney-based advanced manufacturer with over 50 years of history, has built a significant part of its business around solving exactly that problem for the Australian mining sector.
The material science behind mining components
Most manufacturing businesses work with one or two material types and apply those capabilities broadly. Romar’s approach is different. Their core expertise spans silicones, elastomers, plastics, and metals, and they employ specialist material scientists who determine the right material selection for each application rather than defaulting to what’s easiest to produce.
In a mining context, this matters because the operating conditions that components face vary enormously depending on where they sit in the operation. A seal in a processing plant handling acidic slurry faces completely different chemical and thermal stresses to a vibration damper on mobile equipment, or a liner inside a grinding mill. Getting the material specification wrong produces a component that looks right and fails early.
Romar’s silicone manufacturing capability is the most extensive in Australia. Their elastomers work covers technically specified high-quality rubber components, and their plastics capability spans extrusion through to compression and transfer molding. These aren’t commodity manufacturing processes. They are precision capabilities applied to components with tight tolerances and demanding performance requirements.
Design for manufacture: Fixing the problem, not just replacing the part
When a mining component fails repeatedly, the response in many organisations is to order more of the same. Romar’s approach is to ask whether the component was the right design in the first place.
Their Design for Manufacture (DFM) philosophy starts from the premise that a well-designed component has fewer parts, uses the most appropriate materials, is easier to assemble and replace, and is manufactured to specifications that account for the conditions it will actually operate in. Problems that show up as failures in the field often have their root cause in design decisions made long before the component was manufactured.
This means Romar’s engineers frequently find themselves improving on existing components rather than simply replicating them, producing replacements that perform better and last longer than what they replace.
A machine that exists nowhere else in Australia
The piece of equipment that most clearly illustrates Romar’s manufacturing ambition is the DMG Mori Lasertec 65 3D. It’s a hybrid additive and subtractive manufacturing machine, combining 5-axis laser metal deposition with precision milling capability in a single setup. There is no other machine of its type operating commercially in Australia. Only two other commercial installations exist anywhere in the world.
In practical terms, this machine allows Romar to produce complex metal components that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive through conventional machining, and to do so with a level of precision that meets the most demanding engineering specifications. For mining applications, that might mean producing a bespoke metal fitting to replace an imported part, creating a prototype component for testing before committing to full production, or manufacturing a small batch of highly specified parts that no standard supplier can provide.
The same additive manufacturing capability that Romar has used to produce components for Boeing 737 aircraft is available to mining operations that need engineered solutions rather than off-the-shelf parts.
The import replacement angle
One of the project categories Romar specifically addresses is import replacement: components currently sourced internationally that could be manufactured locally with faster turnaround, greater engineering control, and the ability to make design improvements over successive iterations.
For mine sites managing complex supply chains across multiple equipment types, the ability to have a single Australian manufacturer redesign, test, and supply a broad range of polymer and metal components reduces both lead time risk and the administrative burden of dealing with multiple overseas suppliers.
With university research partnerships spanning ANU, RMIT, Monash, UTS, and the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Wollongong, Romar’s engineering capability is connected to the cutting edge of Australian materials research. For mining companies with challenging component problems, that connection to applied research is worth more than a catalogue of standard parts.
Image Credit: romareng.com.au
