Cost-effective maintenance scheduling of cutting arms of drum shearer machine

Cutting arms are the main productive units of coal shearer machine that contact directly with coal seam. More importantly, the cutting arms operate under a high-stressed environment. In this paper, in order to suggest an optimum maintenance plan for the subsystem of shearer machine, firstly, we conducted a failure and reliability analysis using the data acquired from the Parvade coal mine, Iran over the two years. The analysis shows that the Power Law Process model provides a good fit to the failure data. Also, we applied estimated distribution functions and calculated cost parameters to identify the cost-based optimum preventive maintenance interval. Furthermore, we conducted a sensitivity analysis of the studied machine and identified that if we consider the variation of the world price of the raw coal then the maintenance plan is sensitive to the price. The analysis showed that, big changes in world price of raw coal are not so effective on maintenance plan but have a considerable effect on maintenance costs of the cutting arms of the shearer machine. However, the effects of this change on reliability improvement are almost zero.