Development of a Condition Based Maintenance Architecture for Optimal Maintainability of Mine Excavators

Today’s competitive environment requires that industries succeed in sustaining full production capabilities, while minimizing capital investment. From a maintenance perspective, this means maximizing equipment reliability (i.e., achieving maximum uptime), while extending the plants life. This proactive approach needs a Total Planned Quality Maintenance (TPQM) program, the systemizing of all (i.e., preventive, predictive, and planned) maintenance, plus the control by condition based maintenance architecture. As the global marketplace becomes more competitive, such advantages are necessary in order to maintain the large capital mining machineries economic health. The strategic dimensions of maintenance management form the basis for wise decision-making, which can be performed by organizational design, maintenance methodology, adequate support systems, corporate culture and effective maintenance. Although, extensive data base and knowledge pool are available regarding maintenance, its methodology and concerned feedback mechanism, but no suitable or custom built maintenance strategy is yet available for specific mining machinery including mining excavators. Research and Development of a custom built maintenance System is the need of the day because of large capital, productivity and risk involved with the mine excavators in a high capital intensive industrial scenario with acute sensitivity in the performance of such machines. This paper discusses a condition based maintenance architecture program for Optimal Maintainability of mine excavators. The Optimal Maintainability Program (OPM) includes various functional analysis of excavators and its component and various sub-components.