Numerical Analysis of Belt Conveyors for Maintenance Decision Support System

Abstract

Maintaining healthy operational conditions of the belt conveyor system in a coal handling plant is a crucial requirement for all stakeholders. Unexpected failures of belt conveyors cause huge losses to the plant on production efficiency, safety and cost. It is essential to analyse the equipment conditions at an appropriate interval of time to find out the weak units that impact the plant’s operational efficiency and predict their failures in time so that such losses can be eliminated through effective maintenance practices. In this study, the reliability and availability values are estimated using numerical analysis through the stochastic model. Employing the Markov process by taking the rate of failures and rate of repairs as follows the exponential distribution, the belt conveyor system is mathematically modelled. This study findings assist the plant management in identifying the critical belt conveyors that affect the system's reliability metrics and hence need focused maintenance strategies to improve their reliability and availability values. The findings will be of great importance to the plant’s maintenance decision support system in the design of appropriate maintenance policies of industrial systems. Furthermore, it provides deep knowledge to future researchers for studies on the reliability of complex industrial systems.