Improving asset care plans in mining : applying developments from aviation maintenance

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The aim of this thesis is to compare the aviation derived reliability metricknown as the Maintenance Free Operating Period (MFOP), with the traditionallyused, and commonly found, reliability metric Mean Time BetweenFailure (MTBF), which has over the years shown some innate disadvantagesin the field of maintenance. It will be shown that this is mainly due to MTBF'sinherent acceptance of failure and the unscheduled maintenance therewith directlyconnected. Moreover, MFOP is successfully applied to a mining specificcase study, as to date, no other application of the MFOP concept to the miningsector is known.An extensive literature study is presented, which covers concepts relevantto the overall study and which helps to contextualise the problem, revealing themajor shortcomings of the commonly accepted MTBF metric. A methodologyto analyse systems MFOP performance, making use of failure statistics toanalyse both repairable and non-repairable systems, is presented. Validationmakes use of a case study which applies the MFOP methodology to a system,specifically in the mining sector.It was shown that MFOP could be applied to the data obtained from themining sector, producing estimates which were accurate representations of reality.These findings provide an exciting basis on which to begin to facilitate a paradigm shift in the mind set of maintenance personnel, setting reliabilitytargets and dealing with unscheduled maintenance stops.KEYWORDS: Maintenance Free Operating Period, Mean Time Between Failure,Maintenance, Mining

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University