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Equipment Reliability and Availability (3 replies and 2 comments)
In general, the equipment that usually has standby equipment installed in a mining plant environment would be process pumps, crushers and screens. However, it should be stated that this depends heavily on the design conditions, the operational and maintenance strategies, and the process.
Centrifugal process pumps can be quite reliable in pumping homogenous fluids, but in mining conditions where they are usually required to pump abrasive slurries and sometimes with grinding steel involved, wear of impellors will lead to less than optimal pumping volumes prior to the equipment itself requiring any PM-related shutdown. In these cases, standby pumps can be utilized to keep the circuit running.
With crushers, the main cause of downtime is usually tramp steel in a circuit but the same thought applies. In many cases, a circuit will be designed with 2 crushers but both will be utilized in normal operation rather than 1 running and an installed backup. Where steel or other issues require 1 crusher down, the circuit may be run at a reduced rate. However, some processes may be able to be run while temporarily bypassing the crusher in which case the 2nd crusher may not be required.
Screens are similar to crushers in that usually 2 will be installed but both operational. Because the screen media will wear out, where the interval to replace the screen material does not fit with the maintenance strategy for the rest of the circuit, a screen may be shut down for repair while the circuit stays running on reduced rates on the other screen.
Thanks JayPrice, I am desinging 470 t/h PGE ore plant.. so was considering backing up some of the critical equipment that are likely to fail. Your information is a good start. Do you happen to have literature that discuss the subject. I was also considering an interlinked Conveyor system if its possible.
Sorry I don't have any good literature on this, but this is based on a wide variety of plants I've worked in as well as several I have helped design.
This is always a tricky subject with design as all equipment will fail, but the useful life depends on the maintenance strategy. This includes ability to schedule shutdowns for preventative maintenance as well as the installation of condition monitoring equipment to predict failure. There is also a trade-off in design for most plants that depends on sensitivity to Capital cost of installation as opposed to Operational cost of running.
With material handling equipment like conveyors, I have generally subscribed to a design principle that simpler is better. With too many conveyors including backups, this can introduce new failure methods including complicated transfer chutes and diverter gates that may not necessarily be required. I would only generally recommend conveyors be duplicated where entire circuits are duplicated or multiple products are involved. But again, this is a generalization and it depends on the objectives of the project.
Additional reserve hydrocyclone in the cluster, and if there is filtering - a reserve filter.
May you list mining equipment that have low reliability and requires standby equipment on a plant setup