Mobile equipment for underground mining must be designed to survive very demanding, and often unpredictable, operating conditions. Hence reliability of such equipment designs is crucial. The underground mining environment imposes severe logistical constraints on equipment maintenance and repair, hence maintainability is also a significant design goal. A higher level of autonomous operation of machines, and longer maintenance intervals, has also become a requirement for many sectors in the mining industry. Machine reliability and maintainability has become a key issue in progressing towards such advanced mining equipment designs. Identification and analysis of potential failure modes during the product design process is therefore necessary for facilitating the successful design of such equipment. This thesis presents the outcome of a case study focusing on the Design for Reliability and Design for Maintainability of mobile underground mining equipment. Failure Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA), a well-established tool for both reliability and maintainability analysis, is employed. The case study involves a Load-Haul-Dump (LHD) vehicle, and the specifics of the analysis methodology adopted, level of effort, outcomes, and practical lessons learnt are discussed. The relationship between such FMECA analysis and the wider issues and implications of adoption of Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) by both mining equipment manufacturers and mining companies is also explored.
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