Capital Equipment News September 2019

technologies that can help mines in their quest to improve their productivity. According to Zeelie, currently the South African market is driven by asset reliability and prediction technology. This has become critical as operations seek to prevent unplanned downtime. Mines operate at high costs and one hour of lost production has a large impact. “Condition monitoring using vibration is the most common technology being used. In a single line type of mine it is extremely important to know the health of equipment. Failure of one item will result in production stopping completely. In such a mine a full integration of several clusters becomes important,” says Zeelie. “These include, but not limited to, vibration, live oil analysis, belt monitoring and equipment strain measurements. All these clusters are combined into a central predictive system to generate predictive maintenance reports. The visualisation and understanding of the data is the most vital part of such an integration.” Umar adds that traditional condition monitoring programmes usually relied on specialised personnel trained for data collection and analysis. Currently, smart

is beneficial for extending the life of an asset. Digitalisation can come at a lower cost than replacing old equipment. Through continuous monitoring and expert analysis, machine faults can be detected and corrected before having a negative impact on the mine,” says Zeelie. Ntsele is of the view that unlike other prior innovations, the complexity and scale in relation to digitalisation are largely not a deterrent because what enables digitalisation is the use of sensors, some of which are already built-in (digitalisation ready equipment) and depending on the customer’s requirements, some bespoke. “Most modern plants will already be equipped with a reasonable level of instrumentation required to interface with the sensors. The exception will be operations that are old enough to not have the requisite instrumentation levels and old generation machines that don’t have sensors as standard. In this scenario, costs might just tend to be prohibitive and could be a deterrent to adoption of digitalisation,” says Ntsele.

technology allows for either online data collection and also for operator-driven reliability where machine operators can be involved in condition monitoring programmes with cloud technology enabling remote diagnostics. “Specialised analysts are no longer deployed for data collection, helping to keep condition monitoring programmes operations staff who are now able to give input on machine performance. Digital platforms like SKF’s Data Collect not only allow for vibration and temperature to be recorded but also for visual inspection routes to be captured digitally. All of this information is fed back to a Remote Diagnostic Centre where it is analysed and assessed and represented in a report format or even through online dashboards,” explains Umar. Ntsele says there are four key digital technological areas that are receiving attention from industry, namely, computation power, data analytics, human- machine-interface and robotics. “These are key enablers in unlocking value in a way that would have previously been cost more affordable. It also allows for a higher level of commitment from

Several clusters There are several clusters of digital

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