Condition monitoring of equipment used in quarrying and mining applications is critical, helping to ensure predictive maintenance of heavy equipment, such as crushers, screens, and conveyors. Early detection of issues such as excessive vibration, bearing wear, misalignment, or other structural failures is essential in helping to reduce expensive downtime. With demand slowing in recent years and commodity prices falling, effective condition monitoring has become increasingly important helping to maximise productivity, maintain plant efficiency and competitiveness. On the basis that prevention is better than cure, an effective condition monitoring system offers a proactive, time-critical solution that can maximise uptime, improve productivity, reduce costs and most importantly, safeguard operators.
What Is a Condition Monitoring System?
An integrated condition monitoring system delivers a scalable and customisable solution for mining and quarrying operations, enabling plant managers to identify the earliest signs of mechanical failure so that prompt remedial action can be taken.
With origins in the mid-nineteenth century, condition monitoring has become the failsafe solution for many industries that rely on machinery to achieve high levels of productivity and profitability. In condition monitoring, extremely sensitive sensors constantly evaluate the condition of equipment during normal operations, measuring variables such as vibration, temperature, and power draw. It also combines data acquisition, processing, and comparison (against baselines, trends, and similar machines) to identify the slightest deviations from normal performance.
The Benefits of Condition Monitoring for Quarrying and Mining Industries
If you are a plant manager in the quarrying or mining industries, how could condition monitoring benefit your business?
Increased Productivity. Unscheduled downtime is the nemesis of profitability in many industries including the quarrying and mining, as any unplanned interruptions to production will have a rapid and significant impact on productivity. When essential machinery is taken out of service, operatives are unable to conduct their usual work, and bottlenecks occur in the production line. If repairs are complex or new parts are required, the delay in resuming operations can be substantial.
Condition Monitoring alerts staff to emerging problems long before they become serious issues, so a brief equipment shutdown can take place at a convenient time to allow investigations to be conducted, avoiding lengthy downtime later.
Lower Costs. A reactive approach to maintenance, fixing a fault when it occurs, is always more expensive in the long-term. In part, this is because if opportunities to address a minor problem are missed, leading to serious technical breakdowns; also, a ripple effect may occur whereby other components fail as a result.
Over half of machine downtime is caused by hidden internal faults, many of which are difficult to spot from visual inspections. Condition monitoring flags emerging problems at the earliest opportunity, far sooner than would be possible with other maintenance protocols. With minimal downtime required to fix minor faults, lower expenditure is necessary to keep equipment in optimal condition.
Improved Operator Safety. When equipment fails, there is sometimes the risk of injury to personnel working in the immediate vicinity. If an unknown major technical problem is emerging, engineers may not have adequate warning to move to another area of the site, while machinery is shutdown safely.
Equipment condition monitoring provides early warning of developing problems, so operatives can immediately shut down the machinery, or move away from it to a place of safety, safeguarding their wellbeing and the business’s valuable assets.
Condition monitoring specialist Sensonics have over 50 years’ experience in providing market-leading condition monitoring systems including protection equipment, supported by design, installation, and commissioning services. Our vibration and position monitoring systems offer a range of both contact and non-contact techniques for accurate measurement of absolute vibration, relative vibration and shaft / thrust position on critical machines and infrastructure.
For example, our PZDC (Piezo) and VEL/GDC (Moving Coil) Vibration Transmitters (with direct processed outputs) are ideal lower cost monitoring solutions for medium to lower criticality assets, offering direct integration. Both are ideal options for vibration monitoring in quarrying and mining applications. More at: https://www.sensonics.co.uk/mining-metals
