Performance Assessment of Surface Miner in Indian Coal Mines

Abstract

Over the past few decades, opencast coal mining in India has become more prevalent than underground mining, this is mainly because of rising demand for coal. So, in order to fulfil this rising demand, application of larger equipment’s (Dragline, BWE, Surface-miner etc.) in opencast mines has grown significantly. Surface miner is one such equipment which is becoming more popular day by day because of its application in mines where conventional mining is prohibited or in mines where selective mining is required and it also have advantages like less mineral loss, better mineral recovery and better fragmentation of minerals. Globally in different mines around 300 surface miners of different make and specifications are being used for mining of minerals. In Indian Mines, Surface Miners have been introduced in 1996, so, it is still a relatively new technology. It involves intensive capital investment i.e. its initial cost of deployment is high. In order to compensate its high cost, productivity should be improved so that cost per tonne of production will be low and the mine operates profitably. In order to improve the productivity we need to utilize the surface miner as effectively as possible. Therefore, the precise estimation of equipment effectiveness plays a key role in increasing the productivity. There may be a number of measures available, which are used to indicate performance using different parameters. But, the most commonly used measure to determine performance against ability of the equipment is Overall Equipment Effectiveness which is often referred to as OEE. It uses parameters like availability, performance and quality for the estimation of equipment effectiveness.