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

在与加拿大一家大型矿业公司的一名高级管理人员会晤期间，申请人被告知，该公司的全球维护费用为12.5亿美元。从历史上看，采矿业一直在努力优化维护活动，部分原因是缺乏对运营实践与设备生命周期之间联系的理解/建模。申请人休假一年，在此期间，他与一家大型油砂公司的加工厂可靠性小组一起工作。在此任期内，它变得很明显，有有限的理解，几乎没有模型，让维护决策者纳入设备维护和可靠性的工厂运行参数的影响。事实上，采矿加工厂一般都是如此。关于油砂的一个有趣的观察是石油生产和采矿两个行业的整合。在典型的石油加工厂中，操作环境稳定，工厂将运行多年而不会出现重大停机。在典型的采矿加工厂中，设备受到明显更多变的操作环境的影响，因此维护停机的频率更高。当您将联合收割机与石油加工厂结合起来时，其结果是操作环境极其多变，并且对于阿尔伯塔的Fort McMurray现有操作而言，每年的工厂维护成本超过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与设备可靠性之间的联系普遍缺乏理解/建模，这项研究将着重于对这些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工艺设备可靠性的影响，其首要目标是利用这些信息降低设备寿命周期成本。为了促进研究，已经/正在收集油砂作业的数据，并将用于开发方法和测试结果。然后，该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.