Anglo American Platinum’s Amandelbult mine recently implemented solutions from Wabtec’s Digital Mine & GE Digital’s Asset Performance Management’s Digital Twin to leverage predictive analytics capabilities – and saved $2 million when the software caught a reliability issue on one of the mine’s most important assets.
The Amandelbult mine complex is in Limpopo, between the towns of Northam and Thabazimbi, on the north-western Limb of the Bushveld complex. The complex has two mines (Tumela and Dishaba) and three concentrators with a chrome plant. Current working mine infrastructure has five vertical and seven decline shaft systems to transport rock, men and material, with mining on the Merensky and UG2 reef horizons. The layout is conventional scattered breast mining with strike pillars and open pits. The operating depth for current workings runs from surface to 1.3 km below surface. Short-life, high-value open-pit mining supplements underground production as this transitions from Tumela Upper to Dishaba Lower UG2.
The mine in South Africa produces about 7 Mt of platinum ore annually, extracted from rock 1.3 km below the earth’s surface. The ore is processed onsite into Platinum Group Metals or PGMs – a composite of platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium, and ruthenium. The mine has around 19,000 employees and consumes about 155 MW of electricity. Amandelbult platinum and palladium production both increased in 2019 by 2% to 453,600 oz and 208,900 oz respectively.
Amandelbult’s asset strategy and reliability team had been struggling with a major piece of equipment – an air compressor that is essential to the mine’s operation. The compressor’s near-constant reliability and performance issues kept engineering teams up at night. They braced for the worst every time a new issue came up.
Anglo American Platinum turned to Wabtec’s Digital Mine & GE Digital team to come up with a solution. The team implemented Asset Performance Management and Digital Twin capabilities in late 2018. The combined solution uses physical and analytical modeling combined with predictive analytics to give the Anglo American team information they knew they were blind to, including possible future failures.
“We had not looked at predictive analytics to allow us to perform maintenance on a predictive basis,” said Thomas Connolly, the senior asset manager responsible for implementing the mine’s asset management framework. “It was something that everybody was very excited about.”
In February 2019, the remote monitoring solution detected a deviation on this particular compressor’s interstage cooler. The Wabtec & GE Digital’s Industrial Managed Services team alerted the mine’s engineers who, upon inspection, discovered fouling and scale buildup inside the tubes of the interstage cooler. Temperatures had breached the early warning alarm of 80°C (176°F). When the cooler was replaced, the discharge air temperature returned to the expected value of 60°C (140°F).
The catch, undetected by any onsite alarms, saved Anglo American roughly $2 million. The company will continue to leverage Wabtec’s Digital Mine solutions & GE Digital technology as part of its asset management strategy.
