Understanding and modelling the influences of plant operational parameters on equipment life cycle costs

在与加拿大一家大型采矿公司的一名高级管理人员会面时，申请人被告知，他们的全球维护费用为12.5亿美元。从历史上看，采矿一直难以优化维护活动，部分原因是对业务做法和设备寿命周期之间的联系缺乏了解/建模。申请者花了一年的假期，在此期间，他在一家大型油砂公司的加工厂可靠性小组工作了很长时间。在这一任期内，很明显，人们的理解有限，而且几乎没有任何模型允许维护决策者将工厂运行参数对设备维护和可靠性的影响纳入其中。事实上，一般而言，采矿加工厂也是如此。关于油砂的一个有趣的观察是，石油生产和采矿这两个行业的整合。在典型的石油加工厂中，运行环境稳定，工厂将运行数年而不会发生重大停机。在典型的采矿加工厂中，设备所处的运行环境多变得多，因此维修中断的频率也更高。当您将采矿环境与石油加工厂相结合时，结果是在艾伯塔省麦克默里堡的现有操作中，操作环境和工厂维护成本每年超过40亿美元，鉴于维护成本对采矿业的重要性，以及对操作参数和设备可靠性之间的联系普遍缺乏了解/建模，本研究将专注于对参数及其影响有一个基本的了解，然后致力于开发模型和模拟，以预测这些操作参数对工厂过程设备可靠性的影响，首要目标是利用这些信息来降低设备生命周期成本。为了便于研究，已经/正在收集来自油砂作业的数据，并将用于制定方法和检验结果。然后，这种方法将应用于传统的采矿作业。

During a meeting with a senior executive of a major Canadian mining company the applicant was informed that their worldwide maintenance costs were 1.25 billion dollars. Historically mining has struggled to optimize maintenance activities, due in part to a lack of understanding/modelling of the link between operational practices and equipment life cycle. The applicant spent a one year sabbatical during which extensive time was spent working with the processing plant reliability group of a major oil sands company. During this tenure it became apparent that there is limited understanding and practically no models that allow maintenance decision makers to incorporate the influence of plant operational parameters on equipment maintenance and reliability. In fact this is true of mining process plants in general. An interesting observation with regards to oil sands is the integration of two industries oil production and mining. In your typical oil processing plant the operating environment is stable and plants will run for years without major outages. In a typical mining processing plant the equipment is subjected to a significantly more variable operating environment and consequently a higher frequency of maintenance outages. When you combine a mining environment with an oil processing plant the result is an extremely variable operating environment and plant maintenance costs in excess of 4 billion dollars per year for the existing operations in Fort McMurray, Alberta Given the significance of maintenance costs to the mining industry and the general lack of understanding/modelling of the link between operational parameters and equipment reliability, this research will focus on developing a fundamental understanding of the parameters and their influences and then work towards developing models and simulations to predict the influence of these operational parameters on plant process equipment reliability with the overriding goal of using this information to reduce equipment life cycle costs. To facilitate the research data from an oil sands operation has been/is being collected and will be used to develop the methodology and test the results. The methodology will then be applied to traditional mining operations.