After troubleshooting for fan imbalance and visually inspecting, the PdM team determined that there were loose frame bolts holding the motor and fan frame. The looseness had caused structural damage and broken the weld in frame.

The Mercury Scrubber Fan helps with recovery percentage, and a failure would mean shutting down the kiln. While it doesn’t shut down the plant, it can help gold recovery by 1-2%, and over the long term, this can cause millions of dollars in lost revenue. Before working with Petasense, the customer had experienced a failure on the same fan and it was offline for six weeks, waiting for the fan assembly to arrive and causing significant production losses.

Another win for the PdM team was high-flow centrifugal pumps in the heap leach field. The heap leaching operations are used to recover lower-grade oxide ore. They consist of applying a leaching solution to piles of crushed ore to extract the gold. The customer had increased the amount of gold extracted, to the point that both the primary and standby pumps were needed to get the flow rates and the tank was undersized for current demand.

With the Petasense Motes, they were able to diagnose cavitation in the pumps. A failure on these pumps lowers the gold recovery amount. Knowing this, the PdM team were able to identify the need for a design change to increase reliability.

Expanding the program

The early success of detecting failures helped justify expansion of the program to other rotating assets and sites, as well as multi-parametric monitoring. Machine monitoring is limited when just a singular parameter, such as vibration, is used. It’s most effective when combined with related parameters such as load or running speed. By installing the Petasense Transmitter, the customer was able to wirelessly collect data from hundreds of different types of sensors, including temperature, pressure, ultrasound, current, vibration, and more.

In addition to expanding the program to more types of data, the PdM team has identified other assets that are not monitored today. They are planning to install Motes on critical equipment like conveyors, which the PdM team cannot access with normal route-based data collection. Some of these are critical, non-redundant assets that will take down the production line, making them prime candidates for Petasense wireless sensors.

Using Petasense, the PdM team was able to demonstrate tangible results that aligned perfectly with their digital transformation. One of the success factors was the true partnership between the corporate digital transformation team and plant personnel responsible for implementing and using the information. They were able to successfully navigate the culture change by picking technologies that demonstrated fast Return on Investment to both the shop floor and the digital team.