Improving Mining Shovel Uptime

Improving mining shovel reliability with wireless vibration sensors and analyticsEmerson’s Cristián Doerr presented Increasing the Uptime of a Shovel in a Mining site with the AMS2140 at the 2023 Emerson Exchange Immerse Conference. Here is the session’s abstract.

Komatsu is a world-class OEM for mobile mining equipment. They also execute maintenance activities to their fleets of over 70 pieces of equipment in Chile on different customer sites. In a copper mine located in Chile Komatsu performs the condition monitoring using the Emerson AMS2140 for the entire fleet assessment. Komatsu has detected many incipient failures throughout time by using this technology leading to significant savings, even more, they are expanding this methodology throughout Latin America. This paper presents one example of how Komatsu has been able to increase the operating time of the shovels to ensure operational continuity through predictive maintenance.

Cristián opened by describing a leading manufacturer of mining and construction equipment for mining and other industries. This customer has a condition monitoring team to collect data both remotely and locally from the shovels and loaders at the mining facility. Monitoring includes telemetry, vibration, tribology, thermography, ultrasound, electrical equipment monitoring, and rotating axis alignment.

Predictive analytics performs risk assessment to identify conditions leading to failure mode. The AMS 2140 machinery health vibration monitor collects vibration data on the fleet of heavy-duty equipment.

The results of monitoring the shovels to provide a planned motor replacement was 10 hours for the replacement versus 36 hours for an unplanned motor replacement. This equipment manufacturer saved 10% on average for each shovel.

They are now looking to pilot an AMS 6500 machinery health monitor on these shovels to have continuous online measurements.

Visit the Reliability Solutions section on Emerson.com for more ways to drive reliability performance improvements in mining operations.

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