Abstract
Mining in the 21st Century - Equipment Maintenance and Reliability
Advanced Asset Health & Condition Monitoring in Conveyor Belt Systems
Presently the healthiness of the conveyor belt is largely determined through physical inspections at regular intervals and time-based maintenance. However, in many cases the conveyor belt damage happens between the actions causing huge production and time losses to the plants.
A right knowledge about its main failure modes will help avoid unexpected and catastrophic failures in conveying systems and provide enough time for maintenance and operation to act in order to take control of the equipment wear (e.g. reducing load) and maintenance planning (e.g. having enough time to prepare the materials and resources for the equipment repair).
The application of modern control and logging systems on the mining sites provides great amount of precious data that normally is underused. If treated properly, can provide the maintenance engineering and reliability groups an important information source about the conveyor system health.
The purpose of this presentation is to explain how some traditional maintenance gaps on the conveyor condition based monitoring can be filled through the application of systematic failure modes monitoring that takes advantage of existing data and delivers valuable information about potential failures on the conveyor systems. The existing information on the traditional condition based systems can be integrated providing a full-view and online dashboard for the maintenance teams embracing mechanic, electric and control.
Main expected savings of the predictive approach aligns with studies of the US Dept. of Energy achieving up to 40% over reactive and 12% over preventive maintenance, extending the life of the assets and being safer since it avoids unnecessary people exposure to the field. A reliable maintenance time-window for a planned action and an enhanced condition-based approach monitoring the conveyor main components as belt, motor, gearbox, drives and transformers are key benefits.
As conclusion, the use of the mentioned systematic approach is positive and beneficial in the actual technological context of maintenance evolution.