Investigation of various maintenance parameters for auxiliaries in a coal-handling plant aided by a Visual Basic 6.0–based scheduled program

Abstract

Schedule maintenance programs rely on the analysis of collected data during running and shut down time. In a preventive maintenance program, it is difficult to a priori determine the time limit or set an alarm indicating the failure time of a specific component. To this end, a Visual Basic 6.0–based software program is here proposed for a comprehensive running and maintenance database management. The developed software is capable of storing all relevant data related to parts, equipment, personnel, spares, failures, costs, etc, and displays a warning message when the expected life of a particular component has been reached. An unscheduled outage heavily impacts on the production cycle costs, depending on the nature of the failure and the damaged part. Since the variation of the used parts and equipment is high, it is not possible to have an all-encompassing maintenance guide, which is applicable to all equipment. A successful program of preventive and routine maintenance may hence decrease equipment failures rates, extend equipment life, and drastically reduce the overall operating costs. Therefore, the present work can help in preventing unscheduled breakdown of operating systems due to a failure in a component.