Optimal preventive maintenance planning for water spray system of drum shearer

Water spray system is one of the most important parts of rock cutting machines, especially the drum shearer. Field data shows that the maintenance of this system is time-consuming and causes major downtimes in the coal mines' production process. Therefore, it is essential to find an optimum preventive maintenance task and intervals, to reduce the downtime and minimize the associated costs of the machine. In this paper, in order to suggest an optimum preventive maintenance plan, a parametric failure and reliability analysis was done on available data from an Iranian longwall coal mine over the two years. A reliability-based cost modelling was implemented to identify the optimum maintenance interval and frequencies of restoration for the water spray system. In the study, a cost rate function was introduced in which an as-good-as-new effectiveness for restoration actions is considered. The results of the analysis showed that the minimum maintenance cost per unit of time for the studied machine, $19.54/hour, will be achieved within a range of intervals i.e. T=136 hours to T=142 hours.