Imagine your plant is affected by a thunder storm and heavy lighting is causing a malfunction of your 800xA server for your gearless mill drive (GMD). If the server fails, the GMD stops working. This could lead to immense production losses. The team of Minera Yanacocha in Peru experienced such an event. But thanks to a 800xA backup server system downtime was prevented.
Minera Yanacocha located in Cajamarca in Peru operates with one ABB gearless mill drive system. In February 2014 heavy lightning caused malfunction of the 800xA server of the GMD. Only by having a redundant 800xA server installed production loss of several days was prevented. GMDs are the bottleneck in the mining process. So, your maintenance team has to perform all crucial tasks ensuring system availability and reliability. To achieve high availability the team mainly focuses on mechanical and electrical components of the GMD system while the installed control system is not addressed properly.
But there could be a very simple solution for this: The reliability of the 800xA control system can be increased with an upgrade to a redundant server structure. This can reduce unplanned downtime of your GMD system from several days down to several hours. And it is easily implemented: ABB can execute the upgrades to the redundant server structure during a planned GMD system shutdown or a planned control system upgrade.
Depending on the existing control system topology of the GMD an upgrade to a redundant server structure includes typically additional server hardware and interconnections between all existing E-houses. Redundant servers should be installed in a customer server room and 800xA clients inside of the existing E-houses. ABB recommends to update the existing operation system from Win XP to Win 7 during the execution.