Sweating the Assets: Making the Transition to Prescriptive Maintenance
Emerson's AMS Wireless Vibration Monitor
As the global clean energy evolution picks up much-needed steam, the demands on the mining industry are expanding rapidly. For an asset-intensive industry with 30 to 50% of operational expenses tied to maintenance, mining has a significant opportunity to flip that ratio – through an updated maintenance approach that enables more strategic asset management.
Costs are highest when operators follow outdated reactive maintenance practices – doing routine checks and fixing things when they break. This method increases costs, downtime and risks to personnel. Top Quartile mining leaders today are realizing reduced costs, greater availability and better operational performance by introducing a prescriptive maintenance approach.
Using modern technologies, prescriptive maintenance enables operators to monitor assets and accurately predict – and fix – potential problems before they occur. This approach supports not only asset reliability, but also reduces risk to personnel safety associated with machine failure. More reliable equipment also means less energy consumption and reduced emissions.
The path to prescriptive maintenance
The transition to prescriptive maintenance starts with more intelligent assets that are embedded with sensors and automation to boost visibility into processes. These intelligent assets produce valuable data that, over time, reveals trends engineers can use to predict potential issues and identify causes before failure occurs.
New mines can build this intelligence into their designs, with integrated automation enabling a quicker transition to prescriptive maintenance. For existing mining facilities, the process requires more finesse, with a phased approach based on ROI that prioritizes installing sensors and automation in large, critical assets. Sensors and analytical automation form a foundation for the transition to prescriptive maintenance.
This automation ecosystem must prioritize interoperability to be effective. Proprietary tech “black boxes” keep equipment data siloed, while open standard system protocols enable all asset operation and monitoring to be accessible to the entire organization. That accessibility in turn allows remote monitoring and operations centers to provide all stakeholders access to necessary data. This collaboration enables engineering, process, reliability and metallurgical experts to make decisions that are best for the whole process, rather than just one piece of equipment.
Automation also improves asset reliability via machine learning platforms and advanced analytics that can merge process and reliability data to build algorithms tailored specifically to a given process, enabling maintenance decisions based on real conditions. And that data can flow upward, integrating into other higher-level systems to deliver greater operational efficiencies across entire enterprise systems.
Prescriptive maintenance in action
Emerson customers around the world are already discovering the ways prescriptive maintenance can save them time and money while improving all operations – particularly when it comes to temperature and vibration monitoring.
Newmont’s Minera Yanacocha, the Peru-based largest gold mine in Latin America, required cost-effective, constant temperature monitoring of its SAG mill motor, potentially avoiding shutdowns that could cost $1.4 million per day. Emerson’s Smart Wireless solutions help them measure the motor’s temperature at four different points while its DeltaV™ control system integrates alarm systems that notify operators of temperature extremes. This combination also generates trend data that enables Newmont to provide the motor manufacturer with information they can use for improvements.
A Mid-Atlantic phosphate mine turned to Emerson for vibration monitoring and predictive maintenance solutions for its vital heavy-duty draglines. These assets previously relied on manual monitoring of the equipment miles away, causing schedule- and safety-related delays. Emerson’s online monitoring capabilities enabled the team to access and analyze data from a central location, saving $5.8 million a year due to quicker data collection. Improved reliability saved another $1.3 million in cost avoidance during a downtime event.
A copper mining company in Peru turned to Emerson to help maintain operational continuity of 14 critical conveyor belts that transport ore to crushing areas and the copper processing plant with varying power requirements. Emerson installed a vibration monitoring system that delivers vibration data from key conveyor components and monitored all pulley bearings. The vibration monitoring system ensures very high reliability and control while also improving safety by allowing technicians to monitor conditions from the safety of a control room.
Emerson is helping mining customers around the world develop and deploy customized strategies to achieve prescriptive maintenance. To learn more, please visit the website here.