Cleveland Potash Ltd (CPL) on the UK North East coast has one of the deepest mines in Europe, extending miles under the North Sea. The continuous operation of many miles of underground conveyors is crucial for production and profitability.

(PICTURE & DATA COURTESY OF CLEVELAND POTASH LTD A MINORCO GROUP COMPANY)

Not surprisingly, CPL have built up considerable in-house expertise in Condition Monitoring. They have relied heavily on state of the art Vibration data collectors backed up by some of the most sophisticated analysis software available. It is against the back-cloth of all this investment, sophistication and expertise that the MHC - Memo is transforming their monitoring and maintenance strategies. The reasons for this are well understood within CPL:

They have proven that the MHC - Memo detects all the faults that they detect with Vibration
They have found the MHC - Memo to be 6 times faster in the field than the Vibration data collector
Measurements no longer have to be taken by CM specialists
PC based analysis of the MHC - Memo data is simpler and quicker than that for FFT based vibration

What all this means to CPL is that for the first time they can monitor all their conveyor drives. Technicians are monitoring almost 1000 points underground on a three weekly cycle - main conveyors, production conveyors, main fans and booster fans. A range of faults have been detected on motors, gearboxes and roller bearings. Fig 1 shows the trend of the Distress^® on a tension roller (this is a sensitive identifier, >10 is indicative of a problem).

Conveyor graph

The high Distress^® on the tension roller in Fig 1 indicates a problem only solved when replaced after the 3rd reading. Examination revealed wear. After this, the subsequent trend of Distress^® shows a subtle increase from its reduced level and is equal to 10 by the 8th reading, indicating that either lubrication is needed or the problem recurring. Due to the ability of the MHC - Memo to give an on-the-spot indication of problems (i.e. Distress^® >10), it has alerted the operators to secondary, previously undetected problems such as loose bolts, covers etc.

Using the MHC - Memo as a first filter to quickly detect machinery problems on a wider range of machines has had another significant benefit. It has freed the CM team at CPL to better focus its diagnostic expertise on those machines that are known to have problems.

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