Tony Cutler Fausimm
Leadership Learnings
On graduating from the University of Queensland with a bachelor’s degree in mining engineering, my first job was with Hamersley Iron (now Rio Tinto Iron Ore) at Paraburdoo mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
Hamersley’s graduate program prioritised gaining practical experience in the field before progressing to engineering duties. I started on a cable crew, manually lifting electric face shovels and blast drill trailing cable into a cable boat, towed by a wheel dozer, in 45-degree Celsius (110F) summer temperatures. It was a robust start to a mining career. Haul truck driver and then offsider roles on exploration drills, blast hole drills, primary crusher and blast/powder crew followed. Then haul truck foreman, haul truck instructor, grade control engineer and finally long-term mine planning engineer.
Within three years, I joined Otraco, moving from a vocation in mining engineering to earthmover tyre management.
Five decades later, I value to this day the time spent in those blue-collar roles. It engenders camaraderie with colleagues operating equipment or working on the floor or in the field. It led to my realising the importance of collaborating with the workforce at all levels to get the right balance among safety, effectiveness, efficiency and cost for just about any aspect of any project.
Just as importantly, achieving this correct balance requires the appropriate culture that should be set by the mine manager and promulgated through all levels of the site operation.
Tyre Performance and Goals
The life of most mining equipment components is confined within a relatively limited failure band determined by wear and tear, which is typically a narrow normal distribution with low variance. The life of mining tyres covers a far wider failure range, from low-life premature failure (typically due to rock damage) to high-life failure associated with worn-out tyres. It is essentially a reverse-Weibull distribution with a finite upper limit (defined by tyre wear-out life).
"Achieving the right balance among safety, effectiveness, efficiency and cost for all aspects of a project requires an appropriate culture that should be set by the mine manager and promulgated through all levels of the site operation."
Until relatively recently, the prime goals of earthmover tyre management were to maximise tyre life or, more importantly, minimise tyre operating cost. Unlike other components, the true measure of haul truck tyre life is distance, not hours.
Key contributors to achieving these goals are:
•tyre selection (manufacturer and specification),
•tyre maintenance (notably inflation pressure control and matching),
•mine haul road design and maintenance,
•mine operator practices (haul truck, water truck, loader, dozer and grader).
(Tyre management includes all the above, not just changing and maintaining tyres.)
A tyre management system (TMS) is essential for correctly recording, analysing and reporting tyre, rim and associated component price, life and status, scheduled and unscheduled equipment downtime due to tyre service work, tyre change and scrap reasons and other data essential to determining and comparing tyre performance by brand and specification. The TMS is also an important tool for planning tyre maintenance activities and improving tyre workshop efficiency.
Data accuracy is critical to good decision-making (especially tyre life and scrap classification). Otraco uses its proprietary TMS, OTRACOM.
More recently, the goal posts have changed. While tyre life and operating cost remain important aspects of earthmover tyre management, mining companies increasingly focus on minimising the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the mine’s load and haul operation related to tyres. The Holy Grail is to maximise haulage productivity (tonnes hauled per hour) while managing operational risk.
The determinants of overall haulage productivity are truck availability, utilisation, payload and speed. The limiting factor is tyres, which are rated to a maximum load, speed and work capability (tonne-kilometre-per-hour [TKPH] or ton-mile-per-hour [TMPH]).
Monitoring Systems
Real-time monitoring of tyres is essential to maximising tonnes moved.
Most fleet management systems (FMS) offer real-time tyre TKPH/TMPH monitoring to prevent low-life tyre heat separation failure associated with excessive tyre workload.
Tyre pressure monitoring systems (TPMS), which continuously measure and transmit tyre inflation chamber pressure and temperature, are now standard fitment to haul truck fleets on most large mines worldwide. These identify tyres that have lost inflation pressure (increasing susceptibility to fatigue failure). They are also commonly used as a proxy for TKPH/TMPH monitoring.
On many autonomous haulage system (AHS) mines, thermal tyre monitoring systems (TTMS) are used at strategic haul road locations to measure variations in tyre tread temperature to identify hot spots and potential tyre fires.
On the Horizon
We have many tools to measure the performance of mining equipment, tyres and operators. The problem is integrating information from each of these systems in real time and utilising that data to achieve our goal of TCO minimisation.
Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI), together, offer the solution.
Big Data uses application programming interfaces (API) to integrate data from different systems (TMS, FLM, TPMS, TTMS, etc) or transfer it to a data warehouse, which is a centralised digital storage system that collects, organises and analyses this data. Incorporating AI greatly enhances the analytical capabilities of Big Data systems.
A new paradigm of earthmover tyre management may be just around the corner.
