Stirer, I have asked the forum previously, can you or anyone...

Stirer,

I have asked the forum previously, can you or anyone nominate one plant that Jinpeng have designed and built AND provide their data for the percentages of flake size that demonstrates their plant build and end result is superior to other equipment manufacturers.

OR, Do you have data where Jinpeng have taken an existing production plant and with their designs, improved the production. I doubt you can offer either.

So, Other than build quality, who designed the plant is irrelevant.

We know liberation is easier in weathered material. We know the percentage of large flake retained is higher in weathered material. This is a historical fact. We know that lower volume, slower production runs produce more large flake, (if that is what you want to produce). . Conversely, volume processing destroys large flake.

We also know that WKT have very little weathered material and that their fresh material which requires selective mining plus blasting and crushing has the higher large flake concentrations.

We know the geology from both the WKT site and another mine that is, geologically speaking, in close proximity. That geology is very much the same. Some would argue the other mine reads better. Whilst there is Vanadium in both, there is no problem with Vanadium, regardless of plankton or coal origins as croc claims.
We do know the production results from that other mine and that is after several years of production with all the processing fine tuning, improvements, replacement, trial and error etc. The flake data are there for both minimal production when prices were low and now with stronger throughput.

We can see that there were large losses of large flake on initial startup and that they have struggled to make any significant consistent improvement in the large flake production. This is a major reason why they have never been profitable to date.

IMO, the secret to successfully producing graphite( profitably) is to be able to produce a range of material matched to the varying requirements of customers, and also dependent upon what they are prepared to pay for their particular blend. This, in itself, is inherently difficult, as plants are set up for only one type of production with only minor variations possible.. meaning you are stuck selling whatever comes out the end..Mixed baskets, varying contamination, varying Carbon content. In short, Graphite is a completely different game compared to other commodities and not for the faint of heart.