Effective maintenance practices for mining equipments

Abstract

Maintenance represents a significant proportion of the overall operating costs in the mining industry. Despite the large cost of maintenance, management has only given passing attention to the optimization of the maintenance process. As the engineering/mining equipment becomes sophisticated and expensive to produce and maintain, maintenance management has to face even more challenging situations to maintain effectively such equipments in industrial environment. This paper highlights the different types of maintenance practices: predictive, preventive, proactive, reactive being followed for mining machineries, maintenance models, TPM, Modular Mining Systems’ INTELLIMINE1for maintenance and focuses on proper maintenance planning for improving availability and utilization of machineries in surface and sub-surface mining operations.