Monte Carlo Reliability Simulation of Coal Shearer Machine

In this paper the Kamat-Riley (K-R) event-based Monte Carlo simulation method was used for reliability analysis of longwall shearer machine. Shearer machine consists of six subsystems; water, haulage, electrical, hydraulic, cutting arms and cable systems in a series network configuration. A shearer in the Tabas coal mine was selected as case study and its all failure data were collected and used for reliability analysis of subsystems. With negligible assumption of time to repair, a flowchart was built for programming the simulation process. The Matlab mathematical programming software was used for reliability simulation process. Finally the reliability plot of longwall shearer machine was achieved and upper and lower bound reliability were calculated. The results illustrate that the reliability of shearer machine reduces to zero in a period of 100h. There is a 50% chance that the shearer will not fail for the first 12h of operation.