Engineering & Mining Journal

JAN 2017

Engineering and Mining Journal - Whether the market is copper, gold, nickel, iron ore, lead/zinc, PGM, diamonds or other commodities, E&MJ takes the lead in projecting trends, following development and reporting on the most efficient operating pr

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PLANT ENGINEERING JANUARY 2017 • E&MJ; 31 www.e-mj.com ence gained from the original Cerro Verde concentrator project, which is considered one of the industry's most cost-effective concentrator plants. A phased startup of the new concentrator commenced on September 1, 2015, on schedule and under budget. The startup of the last of six grinding circuits commenced ahead of schedule in November 2015. "The most impressive aspect is that Fluor executed a mega project on time and under budget within a five-year time frame," Matthews said. First ore was pulled in late 2015, followed by project mechanical completion in March 2016. Automation and the Connected Processing Plant Once a plant achieves commercial pro- duction, the engineering aspect of the project converts to a program of maintain- ing or sometimes optimizing operations. The plant will likely recover metal or pro- duce concentrate for 10 to 20 years, and conditions such as grade and metal pric- es will probably change during that peri- od. However, today's plant engineer and manager has more tools available to solve the problems that will surface. Maintenance strategies, for example, have evolved from basic maintenance to pre- ventive, planned and condition-based main- tenance. This has changed the way plant equipment is operated and maintained from one extreme (run-to-failure) to the current regime of predictable breakdowns. A key part of a maintenance strategy is asset management, a systematic pro- cess for maintaining, upgrading and op- erating physical assets, explained Dave Almond, general manager of FLSmidth Automation, Americas. While there is no single, unique definition of an asset man- agement system, he said, there is a gen- eral agreement that it is a framework for measuring the health and performance of physical assets to identify potential problems before they escalate, allowing short-, medium- and long-range planning. "Automation and technological advanc- es provide the opportunity to develop and implement cost-effective asset manage- ment solutions and strategies that increase effectiveness and reduce operational cost," Almond said. "In today's competitive envi- ronment, a properly implemented and ap- plied asset management system can mini- mize operational and maintenance costs by predicting the failure of a critical part and facilitate prevention, thereby minimizing the risk of breakdowns—and it can at the same time, maximize availability and utili- zation by increasing the time between fail- ures and decreasing the time for repair." Almond believes that nearly every asset in a processing plant can be categorized into two major classes: production and au- tomation. Asset management for produc- tion assets focuses on monitoring heavy machinery, electrical equipment and mo- tors. Asset management for automation assets focuses on field measurement de- vices or sensors, the networks that con- nect these devices, and process analyzers. "When it comes to productivity, a plant engineer wants to make sure they are get- ting the most out of production machin- ery," Almond said. "They should identify key pieces of machinery that must remain healthy from a mechanical and processing standpoint. Then there is the automation aspect, which needs to be maintained as well. It's more than just connectivity. It's also ensuring the devices that provide information for the automation systems, such as sensors and instruments remain calibrated and function properly."

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