MINE MAINTENANCE
could further optimise performance in the processing plant.
Marina Eskola, Director of Digital Solutions Management at Weir, told IM:“ By building this databank and connecting all this equipment in the cloud, we can generate feedback to our design and engineering teams to help improve not only the design, but also the best suited application of our equipment in mineral processing plants.”
While this internal work continues in the background, the company is expanding its installed base under NEXT intelligent solutions for WARMAN pumps, CAVEX cyclones, ENDURON HPGRs and screens, GEHO positive displacement pumps and LINATEX hoses and spools.
Three modular packages – Insight, Uptime and Production – make up these NEXT intelligent solutions:
Insight provides actionable visibility of system health and performance with condition monitoring, process monitoring, digital documentation and maintenance monitoring.
Uptime focuses on extending availability using predictive condition monitoring, with wear detection and predictive maintenance( Stage 1) and equipment adjustment automation( Stage 2).
Production empowers users to maximise process efficiency with AI-powered optimisation through process optimisation( Stage 1) and process optimisation automation( Stage 2).
While all of these are built as modules clients can pick and choose from depending on their processes and maintenance maturity, Weir has been working to integrate all three.“ The goal with this integration is to not just provide equipment condition and performance visibility; it is about providing and implementing recommendations to sites that can extend the lifetime of components and equipment, plus improve process performance,” Eskola said.“ But all the building blocks need to be in place to do this. For example, plant managers need to know what has happened at an equipment level before they can optimise performance on a process level.”
Not all customers are ready to take the full step into a continuous digital monitoring environment. Different mines and processing plants vary widely in digital readiness, data maturity and budget priorities. To accommodate this, Weir supports customers wherever they are in their digital journey – with options including offline data collection using portable tools, then progressing to Insight, and ultimately moving toward advanced Uptime and Production capabilities.
Weir says a new‘ soft’ sensor to predict impeller wear in pumping applications is currently in customer trials. Unlike previous solutions, it uses measurements customers already routinely generate.“ We don’ t install any new sensors for this; we just use the measurements that customers already have to interpret wear on the impeller, based on engineering knowledge and the databank we have been building,” Eskola said.
On the hardware side, Weir is preparing to launch a new metal component wear sensor, representing a long-awaited step forward.“ The uniqueness of this sensor is its size,” Eskola explained.“ Until this point, we couldn’ t find a sensor that was thin enough and easy to install to provide accurate wear analysis on core metal components.”
This solution, along with others in development, is enhanced through Weir’ s partnership with Viking Analytics, whose anomaly detection and diagnostic algorithms operate without labelled data or manually defined thresholds. The wear data from these sensors will be integrated with performance insights to help determine the optimal intervention point for replacing wear parts. Field testing is already underway ahead of a broader commercial launch, the company says.
Integration does not stop at maintenance. Weir is also developing business cases for linking wear insights to spare parts forecasting and procurement, creating a more automated, responsive service ecosystem. This capability will integrate with the NEXT platform, leveraging AI-driven servicing and automated decision making.
Reconciliation in the plant
Terrance Galvin, Head of Lifecycle Offerings at FLS, is seeing a structural shift in the world of plant maintenance; from asset-byasset maintenance to flowsheet-level risk management.
He told IM:“ Plants are being pushed harder on more variable ores, under tighter energy, water and ESG constraints. The challenge isn’ t just keeping a plant running; it’ s maintaining stable recovery, energy intensity and water balance at the same time.”
He sees an opportunity to use maintenance as the main lever for that stability.
“ With full flowsheet data, we can start to optimise where we spend our maintenance‘ risk budget’; maybe we accept more risk on‘ non-critical assets’ so we can invest more in the bottleneck equipment that controls throughput or recovery,” he said.
FLS’ s PerformanceIQ Hub – located in its Global Product and Technology Centre in Salt Lake City, USA – and asset health / optimisation services are designed exactly for this: to look across circuits, not just individual machines, and continuously rebalance that risk versus value equation with customers, according to Galvin.
The company’ s PerformanceIQ services were originally launched at the PERUMIN conference in 2022 with the aim to“ supercharge mine performance through a full flowsheet approach to optimisation based on equipment knowledge, process expertise and digital solutions”. The addition of the Hub in 2024 enabled the globalisation of these services.
Qasim Abrahams, Head of Spare Parts & Modernisation and Head of Sales & Services for Europe and Middle East at FLS, says over 15 sites are“ connected” to this PerformanceIQ network across key geographies. He added:“ We ensure proximity to our customer base, rapid response times and seamless access to engineering and technical resources.”
Galvin added on PerformanceIQ services:“ The goal is to put experience, better diagnostics and clearer insights into the hands of the people closest to the plant so they can make stronger decisions, faster.”
A second trend in the maintenance space acknowledged by Galvin is workforce pressure.
He explained:“ A lot of the world’ s best maintainers are within a few short years of retirement, while the plants they run are getting more complex. That gap will not be solved by hiring alone.”
“ Scarce expertise” should be assumed across the offering of OEM products and services, with every expert“ multiplied” across multiple sites through remote centres, standardised methods and better decision support, Galvin argues.
Then there is a burning need for the integration of maintenance with production planning and energy / water costs to consider.
“ Practically, that means scheduling interventions when the incremental loss in production and energy efficiency from a worn asset becomes more expensive than the planned downtime itself,” he said.“ Digital tools like LoadIQ™ already show how closely mill load, liner condition and specific energy are linked; we’ re extending that thinking across screens, flotation, thickeners and filters.”
The tradeoff dynamic is likely to increase in complexity when more mine sites start using digital twins to balance productivity and operating costs with sustainability.“ With our MissionZero, approach we increasingly treat maintenance as a decarbonisation and water management lever, not just a reliability function,” Galvin said.“ Every avoided breakdown is energy, reagents and water we don’ t waste. Every upgrade or retrofit that safely extends asset life pushes out the embedded carbon of replacement capital.” As a result, FLS has a list of priorities it is following:
34 International Mining | JANUARY 2026