If you were asked to design the perfect electric motor for today’ s mining and minerals sector, what would it look like? The motor technology, it could be argued, is well established. The motor must meet global mining standards, yet be flexible for adaptation to local legislation; robust to meet the aggressive nature of the environment; and highly reliable, never being the component in the drive train responsible for unplanned downtime.
Yet that is only half the story. It is essential that the pr oduct has comprehensive life cycle services that help define the true cost of ownership of that motor. In short it must provide maximum up-time with minimal maintenance.
What is harder to engineer is ensuring that both these aspects - the products and the services - address the key challenges that the industry faces.
These challenges vary, depending on your role in mining. But whether you are in management, maintenance or an OEM, the top three challenges upon which everyone is agreed is the need to maximize productivity, improve performance and operational efficiency and enhance safety, all of which will help tackle a fourth challenge - profitability.
Although there are no easy solutions, it is becoming increasingly apparent that technology will play a growing role in the mine of the future. In fact, mining is among the least penetrated industrial sectors for automation and yet this is key to improving safety, product quality and cost competitiveness.
Read more from following points in the complete article:
- Maximizing productivity
- Improving performance and operational efficiency
- Enhancing safety
- Tackling the challenges
- Changing the challenges
- Certification
- Technical competence
- Packages
- Product history
- Life cycle services
The key to integrating good motor design with life cycle services is to update or devise a motor management policy. While this document gives a complete overview of the motor installed base, its main purpose is to give detailed information about specification, installation and repair scenarios. A motor management policy helps reduce costs, simplify the repair/ replace decision, reduces down time, make decisions before a motor fails, selects the right motor when replacement is the decision and outlines a procedure for auditing repair shops.