IIoT In Mining
Mining companies are under pressure!
Increasing metals demand, environmental requirements (reducing carbon emissions), word wide competition, lower margins – all are putting pressure on miners for safer, less polluting and more productive operations.
IIoT Condition monitoring is an immediately available route to reduce both costs & risks with a short-term impact on costs and equipment reliability, safety and availability.
Often named “Mining Industry 4.0.”, digitalization of mining operations using IIoT, cloud and advanced analytics allows the optimizing of mining operations. IIoT’s focusses a.o. on maintenance procedures & minimizing unplanned stoppages. In so doing, it leads to higher profits and mining yields. This unrelenting focus on productivity is needed in today’s mining industry. We believe that IIoT is part of the solution.
Where can IIoT help?
More efficient equipment maintenance: a substantial part of the cost of mining costs is spent on maintenance. Depending on the type of mining, it can be 5% to 10% of Opex.
Minimizing unplanned failures: Leading to partial or complete downtime, such failures often mean waiting for repairs in an on-going operation. It can impact the mine’s up and downstream activities at a high cost, estimated to be several times higher in total than above routine maintenance. IIoT is the best tool to predict imminent equipment failure.
Reducing output losses: Mines create harsh and remote working conditions. IIoT allows pro-actively avoiding, unplanned & potentially cascading, operational losses.
Focus on HSE: a top concern for management, for the sake of employees but also for unintended consequences of an unsafe environment, impacting costs and efficiency. IIoT allows improved and continued monitoring of risks.
Support manpower with remote expertise: IIoT supports those operations where less expert personnel are being used by providing access remotely to management to the needed information of the state of the equipment used.
Minimizing unplanned failures and maximizing uptime is key!
IIoT monitoring allows proactive maintenance of equipment – potential failures are detected earlywhich saves money by proceeding with repairs before major damage occurs, the main source of unscheduled downtime. IIoT will monitor vibration, loads, bearings, lubrication, temperature, oil analysis and more. Equipment where IIoT monitoring can and should be used are for instance conveyor belts, crushers, fans, mills, motors, pumps, screens, etc. Depending on the mining operation & type of ore, the consequences of asset failures are different depending on the type of asset that fails – in some operations, conveyors and crushers are more critical, in others, it is electrical or reciprocating equipment.
A good IIoT approach requires an analysis of what assets are most critical and which to prioritize and then finding the right IIoT condition monitoring approach, with a view on the short term result improvement and the medium term integration into a larger IIoT system.