Performance measurement of mining equipment and its significance on production

Abstract

In the last few decades, open pit mines have steadily increased their production rate by using larger equipment which require intensive capital investment. So the companies are finding ways to decrease their unit cost by improving productivity. One way to improve productivity is to utilize the equipment as effectively as possible. The present study shows the analysis of equipment utilization based on each shift in a mine. It identifies causes of time losses for shovel and dumper operations and introduces the procedure to record the time losses. The time losses for machinery were used to calculate the production loss in the. mines due to less utilization of machinery. Also the efficiency of machines was calculated in terms of tonnes per hours (TPH) and was correlated with production.