MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

CONTENTS
1

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 3

MAINTAINABILITY JUSTIFICATION ................................................................................. 4

DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS ........................................................................................... 5

3.1

Standardization ................................................................................................................... 5

3.2

Interchangeability ................................................................................................................ 5

3.3

Accessibility ........................................................................................................................ 6

3.4

Safety .................................................................................................................................. 6

MAINTAINABILITY METRICS ............................................................................................ 8

CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................... 11

REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 12

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

INTRODUCTION

Maintainability measure the simplicity and speed with which a system or equipment can be reinstated to
operational status following a failure. It is characteristic of equipment design and installation, personnel
availability in the required skill levels, adequacy of maintenance procedures and test equipment, and the
physical environment under which maintenance is performed. One expression of maintainability is the
probability that an item will be maintained in or restored to a specified condition within a given period of
time, when the maintenance is done in accordance with recommended procedures and resources.
In general mining equipment must be designed to operate in harsh and challenging environments. This is
due mainly to the presence of dust, water and other elements of the mining operation. In the Caribbean
mining is done using the open pit method for the extraction of alumina in Jamaica, construction aggregate
in Trinidad, and limestone in Barbados.
Also in the Caribbean maintenance of mining plant and equipment is not done in a structured manner and
as a result most companies operate on the Breakdown/Corrective Maintenance philosophy. It is envisage
that this practice be replaced with a more holistic maintenance approach, so as to reduce maintenance
cost which will inevitably contribute to greater efficiencies and profit margins.

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

MAINTAINABILITY JUSTIFICATION

The primary aims of maintainability engineering applied plant and equipment are to increase efficiency
and safety and at the safe time reduce overall maintenance cost. Therefore as a direct result this aspect
starts with improving the mining equipment in the design stages. However, it should be noted that the
introduction of maintainability engineering will in no way exclude the need for maintenance, repair and
servicing of mining equipment, it will certainly provide the following advantages:

Reduction in maintenance related injuries

Scheduled and unscheduled maintenance can be achieved in a shorter time span

Reduction in installation errors

Reduction in unscheduled maintenance frequency brought about by improvements in accessibility

for inspection and servicing

Reduced training needs for maintenance personnel

Improvement in after maintenance inspections

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS

It is imperative that during the design phase careful consideration should be placed on the maintainability
aspects of the equipment being design. These characteristics comprise features which exhibits a major
role in decreasing the equipment unavailability and downtime. These features are categorized as follows:

3.1

Standardization
This design feature primarily involves the restriction to a minimum of the collection of parts and
components that can be used to meet the equipment requirements. Some of the primary goals
of standardization are as follows:
o

Limit the use of standard and interchangeable components

Limit the use of different type of components

Limit the number of diverse models and makes of equipment in operation.

The following are some of the main advantages:

o

Improve equipment maintainability and reliability

Reduction in incorrect use of parts

Lower manufacturing cost and design time

Lower maintenance time and associated cost

Lower likelihood of accidents caused by using wrong or unclear procedures.

Lower spare part inventory

Examples of items which can be standardized are as follows:

3.2

All mechanical items

Hydraulic connectors, valves, hoses

Electrical components and connectors

Water hoses and connectors

Fasteners and other attachment mechanism

Bolts, nuts and other holding devices

Interchangeability
This design factor implies that any given item can be replaced by similar item, and
The replacement can perform the specified function of the replaced item in an effective manner.
Interchangeability can be sub-divided into two (20 groups, which are as follows:

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

Functional

Physical

3.3

Two items serve the same function (e.g. alternators and engine starters)

Any two (2) items can be installed, coupled, and used in the effectively in the
same locations and in the same manner. (e.g. pneumatic jack hammers,
hose/electrical connectors)

Accessibility
This design aspect enables the relative ease with which an item can be reached for repair,
replacement or service. In most instances the lack of accessibility is an important maintainability
problem and often results in poor maintenance. Some of the important factors that affect
maintainability are as follows:

3.4

Location and environment of the item to be reached

Access entry frequencies

The nature/extent of the maintenance tasks to be conducted via the access opening

Clearance available for conducting the various tasks

Distance required for conducting inspection and repairs/replacement

The hazards associated with the access point of entry

Time taken to conduct maintenance activity

All components that require repair, replacement, or adjustment every 2,000 h or less
should be directly accessible from the sides or ends of the machine.

Maintenance and service points should be located no further than 91 cm (36 in) from the
maintainer's head at time of inspection.

Safety
On an almost continual basis maintenance personnel will be required to perform various tasks
which may be located in hazardous conditions. These conditions may be the result of
insufficient considerations given to safety aspects during the design phase. However, there are
instances where some of the human safety guidelines are to install fail-safe devices, fit all
access opening and the study of the potential sources of injury by electric shock, amongst
others.
Some common safety designs incorporated in the manufacture of mining equipment are as
follows:
o

Dust Control and hazardous gas alarms

Operator enclosure should be built to withstand relatively high impact loads

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

Panic buttons

Emergency Shut Down Devices

Protective guards on or around all moving mechanical parts.

Mechanical lockout devices are to be located in areas where maintenance personnel are
to access (e.g., under a cutter head).

Hot exhaust pipes should be routed away from areas frequently accessed for conducting
maintenance/inspection activities.

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

MAINTAINABILITY METRICS
In the design of new plant and equipment, maintainability studies are rarely conducted.
However, with the increasing competitive business environment customers are requesting
maintainability data so as better calculate the life cycle cost of the equipment. It is therefore
important to have available data of various maintainability parameters and/or measures to be
incorporated during the design phase. These measures include the following:
o

Mean Time to Repair

This metric is normally referred to as the Mean Corrective Maintenance Time, and is the
most commonly used measures in maintainability analysis. Probability distribution such
as normal, log-normal and exponential are used to represent corrective maintenance
times.
MTTR is given by

Where
m - Quantity of units
i - constant failure rate of unit I; for i=1,2,3,m
Ti - The corrective maintenance or repair time to repair unit i, for i=1,2,3,m
o

Mean Preventive Maintenance Time

In an effort to enable mining equipment operate at optimum performance level, it
imperative that a variety of preventive maintenance task such as inspections, tuning and
calibrations are carried out. It should be noted that a proper preventive maintenance
program certainly goes a long way in reducing mining equipment downtime and
improving its overall performance.

m - Amount of preventive maintenance tasks;

ETi - the time elapsed for preventive maintenance task i; for i = 1,23, . . .,m;
Fi - preventive maintenance task frequency i; for i = 1,2,3, . . .,m.

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

Maintainability Function
This function is used for calculating the probability of achieving a repair task in a given
time interval and it is defined as follows:

m(t) - maintainability function,

fr(t) - repair time probability density function,
t - variable repair time.
For Normal Distribution

where
- mean of repair times,
- standard deviation of the variable repair time t around the mean .
Substituting the Normal Distribution equation into the Maintainability Function, the following
equation is derived:

The mean time to repair is given by:

where
n - number of repair times,
ti - repair time i, for i = 1,2,3, . . .,n.
The standard deviation is expressed by:

For Exponential Distribution

The distribution repair time probability density function is given by:

Where,

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

- Constant repair rate (i.e., the reciprocal of the mean time to repair, MTTR),
t - Variable repair time.
Substituting the above equation into the Maintainability Function the following equation is derived:

Since

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

CONCLUSIONS
o

It was quite evident that after conducting research, there was a general trend which
suggest that maintainability is currently done mostly using design checklist, and not on a
structured systematic approach.

According to research commissioned by the US Bureau of Mines, the following were

concluded:

In comparison to shop maintenance, a considerable amount of time is spent on

conducting field maintenance which is risky with an associated high level of
difficulty.

As mining equipment is designed to handle larger capacities in a much shorter

time span, there is a substantial increase in maintenance task complexity and
time.

It is therefore imperative that maintainability criterion be incorporated in the design on

plant and equipment, so as to reduce cost, safety hazards and maintenance efforts
associated with their operations.

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MENG-6705: MAINTAINABILITY ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: MINING EQUIPMENT MAINTAINABILITY

REFERENCES

Dhillon, B.S.: Springer Series in Reliability Engineering - Mining Equipment Reliability,

Maintainability, and Safety; Springer-Verlag London Limited; 2008

Peters, R.H.: IMPROVING SAFETY AT SMALL UNDERGROUND MINES; United States

Department of the Interior-Bureau of Mines Technology Transfer Seminar; 1994

Gurgenci, H & Guan, Z: Mobile Plant Maintenance and the Dutymeter Concept;
Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol.7 No. 4, 2001
pp. 275-286

Madu, C.N: Strategic Value of Reliability and Maintainability Management

International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management; Vol. 22; No. 3, 2005
pp. 317-328

Ghodrati, B; Akersten, P; Kumar, Uday: Spare Part Estimation and Risk Assessment Conducted at
Choghart Iron Ore Mine
Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 13,
No. 4, 2007, pp. 353-363

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