A methodology for maintenance analysis of mining equipment

Underground mines possess a wide variety of mobile capital intensive equipment. Equipment failures and the associated down time contribute significantly to the overall maintenance, operating and production costs of the mine. With the introduction of computerized maintenance records and data logging, the collection and analysis of accurate and reliable data are much simplified. Hence, a more in-depth reliability and maintenance analysis can be performed. This paper presents a methodology by which maintenance data is quantified using graphical, analytical and statistical tools. Two approaches for analyzing maintenance data are presented. The first approach describes a basic maintenance analysis to determine equipment failure trends. The second approach is a more rigorous procedure which can be used to predict failure trends using statistical based reliability models. This paper illustrates how a basic maintenance analysis can be used to determine equipment availability as well as trends in the equipment operating characteristics. It also discusses how a reliability based maintenance analysis can enhance the basic failure analysis. The data used in this paper is from Load-Haul-Dump (LHD) vehicles operating in a typical underground hardrock mine in the Sudbury mining region in Ontario, Canada. The data is used as an example to describe the maintenance methodology presented in this paper.