MINE MAINTENANCE
Aspen Mtell can , AspenTech says , perform prescriptive maintenance by forecasting degradation and equipment failures , alerting staff in advance of when a failure could occur , identifying potential causes and the scope of any failure , and providing advice on the corrective action to avoid or mitigate impending failures
While the mining industry is still some way off
adopting such a vision , AspenTech is getting nearer to convincing the sector of its potential future worth .
Evolution Mining , for instance , deployed AspenTech ’ s prescriptive maintenance solution as part of its Data Enabled Business Improvement project at the Mungari gold operation in Western Australia , all with the aim of helping mitigate unplanned downtime and provide information to support productivity improvements .
At the Mungari site , AspenTech ’ s solution is currently monitoring 31 critical pieces of equipment , with the team estimating that the deployment saved the company around $ 429,000 over a recent 12-month period .
Going mobile with maintenance
DINGO ’ s mine maintenance offering has evolved over time , expanding out of its fluid analysis roots to now deliver holistic solutions that continue to improve the uptime of assets , specialising in mobile equipment like haul trucks and shovels in open pits for multi-site mining operations .
Trakka ® , Dingo ’ s platform to manage , analyse and act on asset health data , has been key to this growth and is now deployed at more than 240 mining operations across six continents .
According to Chuck Tollman , Global Enterprise Account Director at Dingo , one of the coverage areas to accelerate in demand over recent years has been the digitisation of visual inspections on equipment .
“ There is a major appetite to digitise that side of things ,” he told IM . “ The mobile inspection app solution from Dingo has solved our customers pains around paper trails , spreadsheets , accessibility and disparate systems .”
While Trakka is an off-the-shelf solution , the company has been collaborating with customers to provide tailored applications that cover requests related to their maintenance regimes .
“ This is normally in the maintenance structure for buckets , frames , articulated joints , truck beds , etc ,” Tollman said . “ On top of recording measurements as part of a checklist , maintenance teams can take photos to provide the visual piece that allow centralised asset management teams to assess the overall health and potential safety risks of the equipment where maintenance and repair tasks can be planned to maximise reliability , availability and productivity .”
As Tollman indicated , Trakka integrates with a mine site ’ s ERP backbone to push notifications through to teams that can act on them , checking on spare parts inventories , verifying the logs against the planned asset lifecycle and ensuring the machine in question is safe to operate .