Case Study - Conveyor Take-up Pulley Reliability - Port InfrastructurePort Operations - WA, Australia

Our client’s Port Operations, located in West Australia, had ramped up operations significantly in just a few years.

<p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p>With the business now operating in a stable environment, the focus turned to equipment and process optimisation.

The operations had suddenly began to experience multiple Conveyor counterweight & take-up carriage limit trips that were delaying production between 15 to 30 minutes for each trip.  These trips were occurring mainly during start-ups.

<p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><span style=”font-size: 20px;”>EnterpriseIS was engaged to conduct a reliability engineering analysis of these failures to determine the Root Causes (if any), and what actions would be required to eliminate or mitigate the effects of these failures on the business. <p>

An EnterpriseIS Reliability Engineer spent time onsite to gather data, included equipment alarm and downtime history, review equipment maintenance tactics and feedback history information prior to conducting a facilitated Root Cause Analysis (RCA) workshop.

style=”font-size: 20px;”>Input from stakeholders was also key in identifying all system and equipment complex problems, defects and faults.

style=”font-size: 20px;”>The RCA workshop identified the following items:

• tyle=”font-size: 20px;”>Timeline analysis found the problem started after a recent scheduled maintenance shutdown, where a maintainer had used newly advised settings by a consultant
• After temporarily restoring the previous settings, the drive pulley slippage started
• Further analysis of the previous consultants work found numerous errors in calculations. These were corrected, using the latest specifications available
• An audit also found that the condition of the equipment was rapidly deteriorating and was contributing to the current problem. A restoration plan was developed for implementation.