Issues and challenges for condition assessment : A case study in mining

Organisations need to continuously review their costs to beprofitable. Thus, they need an understanding of the condition oftheir facilities, their equipment and processes, so that they canmake good operation and maintenance decisions. The miningindustry in Europe relies on complex technical systems forproduction. Error conditions in equipment will result in a failedsystem, having drastic effects on production. These failures canimpact business performance, resulting in increased costs due toreduced availability, reduced productivity, product quality andsafety. Condition assessments of failure data can be helpful inpredicting the health condition of equipment in the near future,thus helping to make efficient planned stops. The purpose of thisstudy is to identify the issues and challenges for conditionassessment in the mining industry. A case study was conductedusing relevant literature, interviews with operation andmaintenance personnel and the production process was studied.The findings showed that the physical conditions of systemcomponents are not always known nor is the useful life of thecomponents known. This is due to the fact that in spite of the largevolumes of data collected on critical equipment, there is littleanalysis done on the data to be able to predict future failurepatterns or failure trends. Maintenance on equipment is often ofcorrective nature. Using eMaintenance for condition assessmentwill help to make failure more predictable thus optimizingoperation and maintenance decisions.Godkänd; 2014; 20140619 (andbra