Mining Maintenance

Resumen

Maintenance engineering is key to ensuring the smooth running of most of theservices and industrial processes we rely on day-to-day from manufacturing to waterand electricity supply grids, from mining to broadband and ICT systems. Effectivemaintenance strategies avoid service or production interruptions, minimize the asso-ciated costs, and improve overall system safety and reliability. As a result, mainte-nance must be part of the core strategy of any industrial enterprise and, as technologybecomes more advanced, so do the challenges of effective maintenance management.The responsibilities of the maintenance engineer encompass the optimizationof equipment, procedures, and budgets, as well as fault detection, corrective andpreventative maintenance across a range of systems. Considering the diversity ofmodern industry and the pace of technological change, maintenance engineeringrequires a truly multidisciplinary skillset combining a high level of competence inmathematics—particularly statistics, probability, and logistics—with practical engi-neering know-how and excellent communication, management, and decision-makingabilities.This book aims to provide engineering students with a basic introduction to theprincipal concepts and models used in maintenance engineering and to demonstratesome of their strengths and limitations through reference to real-world applications.The book comprises seven chapters that take the student through the basics of main-tenance and reliability engineering including key terminology, calculating failureprobabilities and techniques for monitoring system behavior, to increasingly morecomplex topics such as system reliability, sizing maintenance services, and predic-tive maintenance techniques. In each chapter, fundamental ideas are first explainedsuccinctly with worked examples being used later to develop and deepen students’understanding.Maintenance engineering is so much more than simply a matter of repairingbroken-down equipment; indeed, the challenges and complexities of this topic shouldnot be underestimated. Thus, we invite readers to begin their journey into the worldof maintenance engineering with an open mind, in the confidence that, by the end ofthis book, they will have not only a good grasp of its main concepts but also someidea of the passion and dedication it takes to be a maintenance engineer.Our sincere thanks go to Emilio Andrea Senior, distinguished mining engineer andformer adjunct professor at the University of Cantabria, for his invaluable insightsand contributions during the writing of this book.