Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) for Automated Mining Machinery

Abstract

Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) was initiated on 1960s in Boeing company to optimize the maintenance process of aircrafts. Since that date, this method has been applied in wide range of industries and has provided a completely positive results and recommendations for implementation in other industries. RCM is a systematic approach to quantitatively assess and optimize the performance of preventive maintenance tasks and to eliminate non-value adding maintenance actions. It provides considerable cost savings due to optimum maintenance effort, increased safety and productivity. This research considers the feasibility of applying the RCM methodology to fully-automated underground mining machineries as one of the vital requirement of early future modern mining. For this purpose, a literature review has been done to clarify the advantages, requirements, issues and challenges of RCM in other industries such as aviation, marine, nuclear, oil and gas, and process industries. It has been tried to analyze the RCM procedure in detailed and to have a look on the adoption issues and requirement for RCM implementation in fully-automated mining. Mainly, in this research, following RCM documents and standards were used for feasibility study: • Classic RCM in Aviation industry (SAE-JA1011, SAE-JA1012)• NASA RCM guidelines • USA's military standards MIL-STD-2173• International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) RCM documentUsing the above mentioned documents, an implementation issues and challenges in developing a RCM program for fully-automated underground mining machineries has been presented. The result of this study shows that RCM is applicable in maintenance planning for fully-automated underground mining machinery. Because, serious safety restrictions are associated with this kind of mining operation and RCM can properly help the engineers to analyze the safety consequences of any failure and make the best decision for maintenance tasks. However, practical application of RCM has some differences in mining context which in this project are discussed in detail. The investigations show the risk priority number is the suitable measure to select the RCM target component/system. Since, there is no operation in site, detective the some evident failures are become impossible in automated mining. Therefore, we have to consider the smartness level and capabilities of agent-based supervisors to get the real feeling of machinery health and operation condition. Internet of Thing platforms are also required in fully automated mine to develop the machine-to-machine communication and to reduce the risk of failures and failure propagation in fleet level. RCM could apply the outcomes of these advanced technologies to optimize the maintenance actions in automated mines. ; Godkänd; 2016; Bibliografisk uppgift: VINNOVA SIP-STRIM; 20160316 (hadhos)