Raw-mill liner wear forecasting and gearbox failure monitoring
A forecast of the day the mill's roller liners reach their wear limit, and a continuous gearbox health metric trained on the failure the plant had already lived through.
Challenge
A cement plant's vertical roller mill could not run a full year on one set of roller liners, so the liners were rotated every six months at the cost of over a week of lost operation, sometimes at peak demand. The mill gearbox had failed critically twice, in 2014 and 2017, the second time through a twisted planet gear that ruptured an oil pipe and ran unlubricated.
Solution
Arundo's phase-1 analytics on the mill and gearbox data built a linear forecast of liner wear against manual measurements, to name the day a 70 mm wear level is reached and to show which operating conditions go with lower wear, and a principal-component health model of the gearbox sensors that reproduces the conditions leading up to the 2017 failure, with a recommendation to run it continuously and to test it against gearbox failures from other plants.
Impact
A regularly updated forecast of the liner rotation date, benchmarking of current wear against comparable periods, and a continuous gearbox health metric that can warn if the known failure mode returns.