Performance evaluation of continuous miner based underground mine operation system: An OEE based approach

Abstract

Abstract CM is a globally renowned machine, designed to work as a mass production technology for underground coal. Different major coal producers across the globe are using this technology for decades to produce underground coal efficiently. India is also one of the major players globally in the arena of coal production and adopted this cutting edge technology since last decade by implementing at. few of the selective underground coal mining projects. Performance of CM technology is influenced by the geo-mining condition, fleets of other ancillary units and reliability of subsystems while implementation of this system depends largely on the extent of reserve. These aspects generate a scope of large scale research and development in this field. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is the parameter to benchmark the equipment performance globally. OEE is the product of equipment availability, performance and product quality. This mining machine based paper focuses on the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of the complete CM based operation to identify the vulnerable systems, which helps to design proper preventive maintenance programme. The CM based system is divided into few subsystems, such as; electrical, cutter, gathering arrangement, traction, hydraulic, chassis, feeder breaker, shuttle car, CM conveyor and out-bye conveyor. The downtime data used for this analysis is collected from an underground coal mine situated in the central part of India, belongs to one leading coal producing company of the country. From analysis it was found that, electrical systems and conveyors are among most vulnerable systems and deserves more care during maintenance. On the basis of these results recommendations are made to redesign the Preventive Maintenance Programme, in order to avoid the lower availability as well as lower OEE.