Quantitative Analysis of Failures Occurring in Mining Equipment: A Case Study of Underground Mining Load-Haul-Dump (LHD) Loaders

2014

Understanding the failure modes that occur during the life time of mobile mining equipment helps to take appropriate maintenance actions to avoid unplanned failures and reduce downtime hours. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of failures occurring in a fleet of four underground mining Load-Haul-Dump (LHD) Loaders over 10 months operating in South America. Failures frequency (number of failure over observation period) and shutdown hours are compared on a monthly basis. Then, Pareto Analysis is employed to determine critical subsystems of each LHD with respect to the shutdown hours and failure frequency. Finally, the reliability of equipment and maintainability of different subsystems are compared over the observation period .The results show that differential and load systems are one of the hardest subsystems to be actively maintained. While the hydraulic systems and loader wheels are the cause of the longest downtime.

Keywords: Reliability,Load-Haul-Dump,Pareto Analysis,Maintainability,Failure Analysis