Asset Integrity is a critical foundation for Process Safety, Humans Safety, Environment Protection and Productivity. Understanding asset degradation mechanisms is of paramount importance to address Systemic Root Causes (SRC´s) that affect multiple functional blocks and end up causing high impact events.
In mineral processing plants it is of great importance to use a holistic approach, that incorporates data from all process functional blocks, as well as, laboratory, CMMS and other asset integrity functions. This is key to conduct comprehensive Root Cause Analysis to identify true SRC´s. These, when corrected, lead to significant improvements in plant availability, energy as well as, maintenance, reliability and productivity
Too frequently, failures or energy efficiency of heavy machinery, such as SAG mills, ball mills, slurry pumps, and others, are analysed focussing mostly on the machine itself, disregarding processes upstream where true SCR´s are originated.
In IOPTIA´s experience, it has been frequent to find that instabilities in pregnant liquor or process water distribution systems originate a number of failures and energy inefficiencies throughout the plant. When these instabilities have been mitigated, the overall improvement in plant and equipment performance has been significant.
AMOP and Ai-RElia-BDt, two IOPTIA products, facilitate the holistic approach by integrating Process Control Network (PCN) data with Asset Integrity information. These products also allow application of AI for Root Cause Analysis for quick identification of SRC´s.
With Ai-RElia-BDt Predictions of asset degradation events are possible.
More over, Ai-RElia-BDt allows real time monitoring and visualizing of parameters associated to SRC´s, which have strong correlations with the predicted problem. This is key to identify prescriptive actions to avoid or mitigate occurrence of asset degradation events.
Integrated Operations Centres are quick and simple to implement at a very limited cost, thanks to I-Optia web based solutions.