Availability analysis of the main conveyor in the Svea Coal Mine in Norway

Reliability and maintainability of mining industry is more in focus than ever, and the mining systems are becoming more complex and the equipment more expensive to repair or modify. Unplanned failures can result in significant costs, especially when the machinery is hard to repair or spare parts are far away. This paper presents a case study describing a reliability and maintainability analysis of the main conveyor system of the Svea Coal Mine located in Svalbard, Norway. The conveyor system includes several separate conveyors. In this study, the main six conveyors of the whole system were selected for the analysis. The failure and repair data of the conveyors were collected for the whole year of 2010 using maintenance and daily reports. The date was analyzed and the result shows that the availability of six conveyers is 96.44% for one year of operation. However, reliability of these conveyers needs to be improved in order to reduce the number of failures.