Reliability Center says that “up until recently the mining industry has not been known for its commitment to achieving the potential profit margins through the strategic use of Reliability and those programs that establish a Reliability Culture. However, Reliability Center’s mining industry clients have achieved tremendous strides in profit, safety and operational improvements through a collaborative relationship with our consultants, trainers and products.”

Reliability Center focuses on a change from doing things “right now” to doing what is “right;” from reacting to problems to pro-acting to problems; through the identification and subsequent elimination of the problems that prevent the manifestation of major failure events from occurring.

At a coal mine in southern USA, for example, there were recurring slope belt drive failures. During the beginning of 2012 the mine had experienced several unscheduled minor outages that were a result of the mines’ slope belt drive equipment components failing in operation. These minor failures were taken care of in a relatively short amount of time and the slope belt was put back in operation after experiencing only short amounts of downtime.

On April 6, 2012 a more significant failure occurred; i.e., the mine’s Slope Belt South gear box experienced catastrophic failure of both the drive shaft and coupling. As a result the North gear box was coupled to the drive system and started on April 7, 2012. After 37 minutes of operations the coupling side input shaft bearing failed catastrophically. The North Side gear box had recently (about four months prior to the incident) been rebuilt and commissioned at the manufacturer’s facility. The input shaft was removed from the gearbox and the bearing was changed out at the machine shop. The system was re-started on Friday, April 13, 2012.

Due to the unexpected nature and unacceptable number of these failures it was determined by the Corporate Reliability Group that a formal PROACT® Root Cause Analysis be performed to investigate the failures and uncover the true root cause(s) of these significant events.

During the analysis on April 30, 2012 another failure occurred on the TPKL to reducer grid-coupling of the Slope Belt Drive. This related failure was also included in this analysis.

The loss due to repair costs and downtime was estimated to be just over $3,000,000 for these recurring unexplained failures.