Here’s a prediction: Predictive Maintenance will change the way we pre-empt failure and drive efficiency across the mining industry.

Running a slick maintenance operation has always been critical to mining and other industrial efficiency. To riff on an old dictum, if it’s broke, you need to fix it… and, preferably, fast. But what if your maintenance capacity anticipated failures and performance issues, diagnosed issues early and either fixed them before issues worsened or at least alerted staff to what’s happening and provided suggestions as to next steps?

For this promise and others, Predictive Maintenance is hot. Why? Because adding digital smarts to periodic inspection provides an automated, faster, safer and affordable way to ensure equipment is functioning, optimized and capable of a long service life. 

Augmenting Human Intelligence

Modern Predictive Maintenance typically involves a cocktail of technologies that includes fast wired and/or wireless network connectivity, sensors and data analytics. It’s a good example of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or Industry 4.0 whereby previous dumb objects such as drills, vehicles, dozers, shovels and loaders are rendered intelligent with the help of these digital tools.   

Adding compute and network capacity means equipment items can report back on their status, offering information such as fuel consumption, parts condition, thermal conditions or mechanical performance. This in turn can identify when power will be lost, what parts need to be replaced or repaired, the need for cooling to be applied and so on.

Predictive Maintenance is no science-fiction vision of the future where robots replace people. We already have what we need to augment traditional maintenance operations through diagnostics or alerts suggesting further inspection is needed. And increasingly we are pursuing self-healing where hot fixes are applied in real time. 

Mining The Data 

Also, the scope of Predictive Maintenance is not limited to fixing current issues. Data captured can also yield evidence that helps mining companies develop better processes and workarounds that mean linear processes are not catastrophically disrupted. Mining the data means we can understand and act on common causes of outages or correlations that cause downtime or suboptimal effectiveness.

In mining, machines are constantly communicating. High-pitched noises and excessive vibrations and so on give us vital clues. By applying IIoT and telemetry we enhance these basic nuggets of evidence to arrive at a more empirical approach. In short, technology helps us to listen and understand.

On The Road. Together. 

While we all have to drive towards a zero-downtime future, we know that we will always face unexpected issues. But predictive maintenance takes us a long way forward to limiting major interventions to edge cases and exception handling.

Getting to a better maintenance state is partly cultural though. We need CIOs, CTOs and maintenance chiefs to show leaders what IT can do and we need strong, visionary leaders who will act decisively on digitization and sign off on the necessary budget approvals. 

But we also need to bridge the divide between “suits and boots” and ensure that everyone buys into what technology can do and what that means for potentially changing roles. Our new digital assistants can do a lot of the dirty, low-level work we need to get done. Meanwhile, human beings can use their intelligence, empathy and intuition to add value.  

Ultimately, we need to join the dots between the OT and IT world, using the power of digitalization and computation to visualize future mines with exceptional levels of uptime and offering the chance to try out and test ‘what if’ scenarios virtually rather than in the risky, physical world. 

But for now, Predictive Maintenance can show us the quick wins and real-world advantages when we overlay data insights on the machinery we depend on every day. 

Do you want to learn more about how Machine Health Solutions can support your workforce? Reach out by email or phone me directly at +1-(814)-935-0001 so we can arrange a conversation.

You can also read: ‘Minding the Age Gap: Solutions for the Next Generation of Miners‘.

The post How Predictive Maintenance Can Solve Mining’s Greatest Challenges appeared first on Augury.

As the mining industry faces challenges in maintaining a skilled workforce, trained AI systems can bridge the gap in identifying, tracking and dealing with potential problems – before they happen.

Digging For Talent

Mining has an age problem. As a generation of baby boomers enters retirement and as younger generations opt not to enter the sector, the industry is facing a demographic challenge and a big hiring obstacle that’s familiar to organizations everywhere: “Can’t find ‘em, can’t keep ‘em.”

But for mining, the situation is particularly acute. This is a vertical characterized by a loyal but aging workforce. It typically is an environment where roles are learned “on the job” and passed on to others via a sort of skills osmosis. It’s tight knit too, with generations of families working in the same industry or even the same mines. Loosen those ties that bind and the transfer of talent becomes tougher, potentially leading to skills gaps. 

Share the Knowledge. Digitally.

The happier news? As with other sectors attempting to manage change in turbulent periods, help is at hand through digital technology. Notably, as mining sees more workers retire, artificial intelligence and supporting technologies can help empower and upskill the next generation.

Now, let’s look at how that happens. Mining gets into the bloodstream of communities as knowledge is shared and miners compare experiences built up over the years and decades. Experienced mineworkers intimately understand every piece of equipment they use and are alert to the nuances of sound, movement and vibrations that hint at equipment failure or, worse, danger. 

A trained AI system can help to bridge the skills gap by recognizing those clues in the performance of pumps, fans, conveyance systems, crushers and other critical processing equipment. Sensors and software can drill down to identify errors and address them proactively or relay trouble tickets to where they need to go so experts can make human judgments on next steps.

Amplifying Safety and Efficiency

Faced with an aging workforce as well as other, existential risks relating to sustainability, mining needs to be refreshed by the power of technology. Digital tools can augment or even replace physical activities and make modern mines safer and more efficient.  

Technology won’t replace the people who have dedicated their working lives to mining with skill, passion and experience. But it can help them to do their jobs better, faster and more safely as the industry modernizes and seeks to capitalize on rising demands for minerals that feed into batteries, electronics equipment and electric vehicles.

We can’t go in with attitudes of “we’ve always done it like this” because mining itself is changing rapidly and the industry must have the same appetite for technological change that we see in other progressive sectors. The conundrum is clear: change proactively or get ready to be changed anyway. 

Do you want to learn more about how Machine Health solutions can support your workforce? Reach out by email or phone me directly at +1-(814)-935-0001 so we can arrange a conversation.

Read ‘How Predictive Maintenance Can Solve Mining’s Greatest Challenges‘.

The post Minding the Age Gap: Solutions for the Next Generation of Miners appeared first on Augury.