MINE MAINTENANCE
“ There is a massive potential for improvement in the industry to complement scheduled maintenance with predictive maintenance ,” Molycop says
Darren O ’ Connell , President of Molycop Technologies , says the common aim with any of these projects is to improve stability and enable optimisation of every lever across the mineral processing circuit in real time using predictive tools .
“ It is fantastic to see that we have moved beyond the accuracy and flexibility limitations of traditional analytical techniques ,” he told IM .
Such solutions have , in customer comminution circuits ( crushing , SAG and ball milling ), resulted in : n Throughput increases of between 5 % and
20 %; and in some cases over 20 %; n A reduction in planned shutdowns of 25 %, stemming from the use of MillSlicer to reduce mill liner damage and wear ; n A 5-10 % reduction in grinding media consumption ; and n Improved mill power utilisation ( kWh / t ) of between 3 % and 10 %; Looking at MillSlicer , an advanced measurement solution that consists of vibration sensors mounted on the mill shell , specifically , the company can monitor the angular impact intensity , maximum impact angle and centroid of the impacts through the use of sensors and software . This can be used to infer the charge distribution and conditions to achieve the most effective impact alignment with the charge , Molycop says .
“ Connecting MillSlicer with Molycop ’ s VIP Data Platform allows the collation of this live operating data into a secure cloud , facilitating visualisation of mill performance and data analytics by experts located anywhere in the world ,” the company says .
This service also acts as a historical record for process data and can be expanded to include data from other sources , such as mining and geometallurgy , to allow predictive control .
In one case study , a gold mine was able to reduce its planned shutdowns by 25 % using this MillSlicer VIP platform , enabling it to carry out three shutdowns a year instead of four .
“ The payback from such an improvement is significant , not only due to using less liners but also due to the significant increase in throughput ,” Molycop said . “ The cost of shutting down a mill can be around $ 100,000 an hour , and
a typical shutdown can be two or more days . A mine can also spend $ 10 million or more on a typical shutdown to fly in shutdown crews and replace liners , etc .
“ Eliminating one shutdown can be worth $ 20 million or more in a large mine .”
Molycop has also developed an advanced intelligent computational framework , the Molycop Digital Engine , for predicting the behaviour and optimising the performance of comminution circuits , with a specific focus on SAG processes .
JANUARY 2024 | International Mining 35