Industrial Case Study

A model for optimal armature maintenance in electric haul

truck wheel motors: a case study
Benjamin Lhorente
a
, Diederik Lugtigheid
b,
*
, Peter F. Knights
c
, Alejandro Santana
d
a
Komatsu Chile, Av. Americo Vespucio 0631, Quilicura, Santiago, Chile
b
Condition-Based Maintenance Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto,
5 Kings College Road, Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S3G8
c
Canadian Chair of Mining and Associate Professor, Ponticia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Centro de Mineria,
Av. Vicuna MacKenna 4860, Santiago, Chile
d
Reliability and Development of Komatsu Chile, Av. Americo Vespucio 0631, Quilicura, Santiago, Chile
Received 25 September 2003; accepted 24 October 2003
Abstract
The objective of the work presented in this paper is the determination of an optimal age-based maintenance strategy for wheel motor
armatures of a eet of Komatsu haul trucks in a mining application in Chile. For such purpose, four years of maintenance data of these
components were analyzed to estimate their failure distribution and a model was created to simulate the maintenance process and its
restrictions. The model incorporates the impact of successive corrective (on-failure) and preventive maintenance on necessary new
component investments. The analysis of the failure data showed a signicant difference in failure distribution of new armatures versus
armatures that had already undergone one or several preventive maintenance actions. Finally, the model was applied to calculate estimated
costs per unit time for different preventive maintenance intervals. From the resulting relationship an optimal preventive maintenance interval
was determined and the operational and economical consequences and effects with respect to the actual strategy were quantied. The
application of the model resulted in the optimal preventive maintenance interval of 14,500 operational hours. Considering the failure
distribution of the armatures, this optimal strategy is very close to a run-to-failure scenario.
q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Weibull analysis; Armatures; Electric motors; Repairable system; Maintenance optimization
1. Background
In 1996, Komatsu Chile (KC) put into operation a eet of
haul trucks in a mining application in Chile. KC delivered
these machines under a repair and maintenance contract,
taking full responsibility of all repair and maintenance work
at guaranteed availability and maintenance costs.
The haul truck is an electric drive DC truck. This means
that propulsion is delivered to the rear wheels by means of
two parallel electric DC wheel motors. The wheel motors
receive rectied electric power from the main alternator
working in conjunction with a diesel engine. The wheel
motors are mounted on the trucks axle box and provide
the function of axle, transmission and wheel motor at the
same time. The wheel motors main components are the
wheel hub, ring gear structure, planetary gears, sun gear and
armature, see Fig. 1.
The armature is the rotor of the electric motor and
can be removed from it independently. It primarily
consists of bearings, commutator, brushes, spools and
poles. The armature commutator consists of copper bars
and mica plates. The mica plates physically separate and
isolate the copper bars and provide a radial pressure to
ensure the commutators stability. The mica bars have
less altitude than the copper bars and are located below
the commutators supercial area to prevent interaction
with the sliding brushes on the area. The copper bars
have a wedge shape form and together form a cylinder.
Each bar has a riser for connection to the armatures
spools.
0951-8320/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ress.2003.10.016
Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218
www.elsevier.com/locate/ress
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: 1-416-946-5528; fax: 1-416-946-5462.
E-mail addresses: lugtigh@mie.utoronto.ca (D. Lugtigheid),
blhorente@komatsu.cl (B. Lhorente), knights@ing.puc.cl (P.F. Knights),
asantana@komatsu.cl (A. Santana).
According to a recent study on the trucks at the same
mining operation, the wheel motors together with its
armatures are the most critical system of the machine. It
can be classied acute and cronic (Knights [1] and
Turina [2]), meaning a high failure frequency and a high
mean time to repair. At the same time the armature is
considered to be critical because of its high maintenance
costs.
Due to the high criticality of the armatures in terms of
reliability, availability and costs, a study was performed to
dene how the components operational parameters as well
as its costs could be improved. This was done through the
development and application of an optimal preventive
maintenance (PM) model to determine the PM strategy that
minimizes costs per unit time. As well, the impact of this
strategy on the haul trucks operational parameters was
evaluated. The ndings of this study are presented in this
paper.
2. Problem formulation
The current PM strategy is to carry out PMs at intervals
of 9,000 operational hours. If an armature failure occurs
beforehand, a corrective maintenance (CM) is carried out.
Although PMs and CMs are different types of events, the
armature reconditioning activities to be undertaken are the
same. The occurrence of armature failures is directly related
to the PM interval. Longer PM intervals will cause more
failures to occur, and vice versa. The objective of this study
is to determine the optimal trade-off between CM and PM
that minimizes the operating costs per unit time of the
armature.
A key activity of the reconditioning process is commu-
tator resurfacing. This activity consists of equalizing the
commutators surface by removing a thin layer of material
from the external surface of the copper bars and mica plates.
A new commutator has a diameter of 16.5
00
and the limit for
proper operation is 15.5
00
. In case of a CM, on average 0.25
00
of material is removed and, in case of a PM, only 0.15
00
. This
means that the total useful life is limited by the amount of
material that is removed
1
and whenever an armature reaches
the diameter limit of 15.5
00
, the PM or CM activity cannot
restore the proper functioning of the component and a new
armature must be purchased. The repair costs for recondi-
tioning are the same for both a PM or a CM. Besides the
diameter restriction, the armature has a maximum total
useful life of 40,000 h. This means that after 40,000
accumulated operating hours, independently of its diameter,
the armature must be replaced by a new one. The costs of a
new armature are approximately 13 times the cost of
reconditioning and we shall refer to the purchase of a new
armature as a result of any of these two restrictions as
renewal.
The optimization horizon is 40,000 hours. This means
that if a new armature is needed within this period, KC must
incur full cost. On the contrary, no costs for KC are incurred.
The objective is to dene an optimal age-based PM
strategy over a period of 40,000 h. In practical terms, this
means dening a PM interval resulting in the least cost per
unit time.
3. The general PM model
For every component under an age-based PM policy
there exist two types of maintenance actions: preventive
(PM) and corrective (CM). The mean time to failure (at
which a CM must be carried out) and the PM interval
together with their probabilities of occurrence are
interrelated. Longer PM intervals result in greater mean
times to failure. But at the same time the probability of
occurrence of a failure at higher PM intervals is higher.
These relationships can be used to dene the optimal
PM interval that minimizes the costs per unit time.
Dening:
C
p
PM Costs (US$)
C
f
CM Costs (US$)
T
p
PM interval (operating hours)
FT
p
Probability of a failure occurring before reaching
the PM interval T
p
RT
p
Survival probability equal to 1 2FT
p

Thus, within the age-based PM policy two different

cycles can be distinguished: the component survives T
p
and
a PM is carried out incurring a cost C
p
or the component
fails beforehand and a CM must be carried out incurring
a cost C
f
: For this model the expected costs per unit time in
Fig. 1. Wheel motor components.
1
It is important to mention that the amount of material removed from the
commutators surface per PMor CMis less than the given values. However,
while in operation, the commutator looses material as well and the given
values are average values of the differences in diameter between two
consecutive maintenance actions.
B. Lhorente et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218 210
function of T
p
can be written as (Jardine [3]),
CT
p

C
p
RT
p
C
f
FT
p

T
p
RT
p
MT
p
FT
p

; 1
where MT
p
represents the mean time to failure of an
armature subject to corrective maintenance with a PM
interval of T
p
and,
FT
p

T
p
0
f tdt 2
MT
p

T
p
0
tf tdt
FT
p

; 3
where f t is the probability density function (p.d.f.) of the
times to failure.
Whenever the p.d.f. of the times to failure of the
component is known, the costs per unit time can be
minimized over T
p
; resulting in the optimal PM interval T
p
p
:
4. Data treatment and analysis
From the model presented above it can be seen that the
denition of the p.d.f. is critical to the process of
determining T
p
p
: The p.d.f. describes the components
failure characteristics. Before using the components
maintenance history to estimate its p.d.f., the data should
be thoroughly analyzed.
The nature of the reconditioning process is to restore the
proper functioning of the component and reduce its risk of
failure. Although the probability of failure should be
reduced by a CM or PM, it is unlikely that its behavior
will be identical to that of a new component (so called good-
as-new or GAN). It is more likely that its failure rate is
higher than that of a new component, but less than just
before the maintenance action was carried out (so called
better-than-old-but-worse-than-new or BOWN). The same
reasoning holds for armatures undergoing a second, third,
etc. maintenance.
It has been shown that an armatures physical state
changes with each maintenance through a reconditioning
process. This might affect the armatures p.d.f. For this
reason, the failure data was separated into three groups:
new armatures (before the rst PM or CM, group 1), after
the rst but before the second PM or CM (group 2), and
after the second PM or CM (group 3). At the same time a
separation was made between right-hand and left-hand
side armatures. This was done to verify whether or not the
failure characteristics of armatures are different in these
cases. The amount of data in each data set is shown in
Table 1.
The data in each set consisted of failures and suspen-
sions. The latter correspond to PMs (reconditioning before
failure has occurred). These data were gathered from
August 1996 until March 2001.
4.1. Data distribution and independence
The rst check undertaken was to examine whether or
not the data in each data set were independent and
identically distributed. If this were not the case, an
Table 1
Amount of data in data sets
Group Left-hand armature Right-hand armature
1 64 63
2 40 37
3 41 35
Total 145 135
Fig. 2. Trend plots for left-hand side (left) and right-hand side (right).
B. Lhorente et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218 211
erroneous estimation of the p.d.f.s would result. A serial
correlation test was applied to test for independency of the
data. This test consists of ranking the failure times (not
suspensions) according to their date of occurrence, making
pairs X
i
; X
i21
of each two subsequent failure times for
i 2n where n is the amount of observed failures and
plotting them. If the position of the data points is randomly
distributed among the graph, the data can be considered
independent (Vagenas et. al. [4]). All subsets showed this
behavior, so it was assumed that the data in each of the six
datasets were independent.
To verify whether the data in the different data sets were
identically distributed, trend plots were used. These are
obtained by plotting the accumulated times to failure against
accumulated failure number (ordered according to date of
occurrence). In the case that the graph shows a unique linear
trend, the failure data of the subset can be considered
identically distributed. In the case that the graph shows two or
more linear segments, it can be concluded that at a certain
moment in time the failure distribution of the subset changed.
This can occur due to changes in maintenance procedures or
in operational parameters such as, haul routes, climatic
conditions or other external factors. In this study, whenever
this was detected, only data belonging to the most recent
distribution was considered. This was done because the
objective of this study is to determine the best strategy under
actual circumstances. In Fig. 2 the trend plots for left
and right-hand armatures before the rst maintenance are
shown.
4.2. Histograms
The next step in the data analysis process was to
analyze how failure frequencies relate to accumulated
operating hours and month of occurrence for each of the
different data sets. This was done to get a clearer
understanding of the variation of failure frequencies with
respect to the position of the armature, accumulated
operating hours and calendar time. The following
observations were made.
Fig. 3. Failure frequencies versus time (all groups).
B. Lhorente et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218 212
The failure frequencies versus time and operating
hours are very similar for left and right hand armatures.
This was conrmed by a statistical hypothesis test.
See Fig. 3.
The failure data of group 1 showed higher failure
frequencies at higher operating hours. However, groups
2 and 3 showed more failures concentrated at lower
operating hours.
Failure frequencies are highest during rst quarters.
First quarters contain 39% of the total failures and the
second, third and fourth 23, 18 and 20%, respectively.
The rst quarter of each year coincides with the
occurrence of adverse climatic conditions in the region
where the mine is located. This particular climatic
event is associated with heavy rain and electric storms,
which affects the operating parameters of the armature
and causes additional failures (see Fig. 4).
4.3. Causes of failure
The 280 data of the six data sets consisted of 156 failures
(CMs) and 124 suspensions (PMs). Table 2 shows the
causes of failure of the 156 failures.
The dominant failure mode is ashovers and for a
considerable amount of failures (32) no cause was identied.
4.4. Distribution tting
For the determination of the p d.f. in this study, the
Weibull distribution was chosen, due to its exibility in
representing components with constant, increasing and
decreasing failure rates. This property is particularly useful
when dealing with different failure distributions among the
data sets of groups 1, 2 and 3, as was the case in this study.
The p.d.f. of the three parameter Weibull distribution is,
f t
b
h
t 2t
0
h

b21
e
2
t2t
0
h

; for t . t
0
: 4
Where b is the shape parameter, h is the scale factor or
characteristic life and t
o
is the failure-free time. The data
in this study consisted of times to failure (CMs) as well as
PMs (suspended or censored data). For this reason the
data were adjusted according to mean and median ranks
before the actual tting process (OConnor [5]). The
tting process was carried out in Excel, using linear
regression. The results of the tting process are shown in
Tables 35.
From these tables it may be concluded that:
For new armatures (group 1), the shape parameter varies
between 0.8 and 0.9 and is less than 1 which indicates
infant mortality.
For armatures that have undergone one or more
maintenance (groups 2 and 3), the shape parameter varies
between 1.0 (constant failure rate) and 1.3, indicating
near-randomness of the failure data. Some wear is evident
and the characteristic life is much smaller than group 1.
In all data sets the shape parameter increases with every
maintenance. This validates the conclusions drawn from
the histograms, that with every maintenance action
the mean life of the component diminishes and failure
rates increase.
Fig. 4. Failure frequency versus time (all groups).
Table 2
Causes of failure
Cause Amount
Flashover 118
Ground fault/short circuit 7
Unknown 32
Table 3
Left-hand armature Weibull parameters
Parameter Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Total
b 0.809 1.247 1.235 1.043
h 36,286 6,382 5,264 12,304
t
0
0 0 0 0
Table 4
Right-hand armature Weibull parameters
Parameter Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Total
b 0.897 1.012 1.215 1.119
h 11,014 7,538 5,149 6,914
t
0
0 0 0 0
B. Lhorente et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218 213
The shape parameters of left and right hand armatures are
very similar, validating the conclusions drawn from the
histograms.
With the exception of the characteristic life difference for
the group 1 right-hand and left-hand armatures, it was
concluded that there was little difference between the failure
parameters for right andleft hand armatures. Inthe interests of
developing a uniform maintenance policy, it was decided to
use the Weibull parameters for each group without dis-
criminatingbetween right andleft-hand failures (see Table 5).
5. Model application
In order to apply the general optimal PM model to dene
the optimal PM interval T
p
p
; some adjustments have to be
made, and in order to do so the following variables are
dened:
M
n
T
p
Mean time to a CM before the nth maintenance
given PM at T
p
.
F
n
T
p
Accumulated failure probability before the nth
maintenance given PM at T
p
.
R
n
T
p
Survival probability before the nth maintenance
given PM at T
p
:
V
C
The length of the optimization horizon (operating
hours)
C
A
Cost of a new armature (US$).
As in the general PM model, there exist two different
cycles. The armature can be preventively maintained at time
T
p
at a preventive maintenance cost C
p
with a survival
probability of R
n
T
p
; or can fail at time M
n
T
p
with a
corrective maintenance cost C
f
and a failure probability
F
n
T
p
: The successive occurrence of these cycles form
maintenance sequences, S
i
; with each sequence giving an
armature life of V
i
operating hours prior to renewal. These
can be represented by means of a maintenance probability
tree, as shown in Fig. 5.
The tree must be interpreted as follows. We start with a
new armature (left node). Two scenarios might happen: the
armature fails with probability F
1
T
p
or survives until
the PM interval T
p
with probability R
1
T
p
: In both cases,
the armature must be reconditioned incurring a cost of C
f
or
C
p
; after which the armature is put back into operation.
Now, the same scenarios might happen once again, but with
respective probabilities F
2
T
p
and R
2
T
p
; as the armatures
have been reconditioned one time and now its failure
characteristics are described by the p.d.f. of group 2.
The i 1k different sequences represent all possible
successive maintenance (PM or CM) events between t 0
and t V
C
. However, besides preventive and corrective
maintenance, armature renewals take place and these must
be incorporated in the maintenance tree. Within a cycle,
2
renewals, PMs and CMs are mutually exclusive events. This
means that whenever a cycle has been completed within any
sequence i (this can be at time T
p
or M
n
T
p
), instead of a
PM or CM cost C
p
or C
f
; a renewal cost C
A
is incurred when
at least one of the following conditions is met:
The useful life of the armature has reached the
maximum,V
M
If r
ij
represents the amount of material to be removed
from the commutator surface in maintenance j since
the last renewal of the armature of sequence i; then if
r
ij
, 1 2
P
n
i
21
j1
r
ij
; ;i; j a renewal must take place.
Therefore, sequences may vary in length in terms of the
number of cycles of which they consist, however,
accumulated sequence operating hours cannot exceed the
length of the optimization horizon, V
C
. The cycle number of
a sequence is denoted by j, which can have values between 1
and n
i
(where i is the sequence number) and it resets itself to
1 whenever a renewal takes place. Additionally the
following variables are dened.
C
i
Accumulated maintenance costs of sequence i:
P
i
Probability of sequence i:
a
i
; b
i
; c
i
Integer variables indicating amount of PMs (before
the rst, second and after third maintenance)
occurring in sequence i:
Fig. 5. The maintenance probability tree.
Table 5
Total armature Weibull parameters
Parameter Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Total
b 0.866 1.163 1.276 1.082
h 24,918 6,785 5,147 6,914
t
0
0 0 0 0
2
A cycle refers to the time between two successive event (these can be
PMs, CMs or renewals).
B. Lhorente et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218 214
d
i
; e
i
; f
i
Integer variables indicating amount of CMs
(before the rst, second and after third mainten-
ance) occurring in sequence i:
CT
p
Expected total costs of tree with PM interval of T
p
:
C
M
T
p
Expected maintenance cost of tree with PM
interval of T
p
:
C
R
T
p
Expectedrenewal cost of tree withPMinterval of T
p
:
In this way, the following set of equations represent the
nal model:
P
i
R
1
T
p

a
i
R
2
T
p

b
i
R
3
T
p

c
i
F
1
T
p

d
i
F
2
T
p

e
i
F
3
T
p

f
i
5
V
i
a
i
b
i
c
i
T
p
d
i
M
1
T
p
e
i
M
2
T
p
f
i
M
3
T
p
6
C
i
a
i
b
i
c
i
C
p
d
i
e
i
f
i
C
f
7
The expected maintenance and renewal costs are:
C
M
T
p

X
k
i1
C
i
P
i
X
k
i1
V
i
P
i
8
C
R
T
p

C
A
X
k
i1
V
i
P
i
9
Thus the total expected costs for a PM interval of T
p
is:
CT
p
C
M
T
p
C
R
T
p
10
The values of CT
p
are different for every T
p
due to
differences between maintenance trees in terms of sequence
probabilities, amount of maintenance and renewals. How-
ever, the tree conguration (number of cycles per sequence)
also changes in discrete steps according to T
p
: In the case of
the armature maintenance problem, it was decided to
construct maintenance trees for 250 , T
p
, 17; 000; with
steps of 250 h. This was based upon the fact that the
maximum observed lifetime between two successive
maintenance actions was 17,000 h. Within this PM time-
span, 16 different maintenance tree congurations could be
constructed (see Table 6).
6. Results
The results were simulated using a Microsoft Excele
spreadsheet, and are presented in Fig. 6.
In Fig. 6 it can be seen that the expected total useful life
of the armatures increase with higher T
p
intervals, however,
this increase gradually diminishes. The reason for this is that
at low T
p
intervals the armatures total useful life is
restricted by its diameter restriction. At higher values of T
p
the maximum useful life restriction V
M
becomes
dominant. As well it can be seen that, for all values of T
p
;
the expected renewal cost per unit time is much higher than
the expected maintenance cost per unit time. This is to be
expected, as the cost of renewal is 13 times the costs of
preventive and corrective maintenance. The maintenance
costs decrease continuously as T
p
increases. The renewal
costs decrease in general terms but its evolution is discrete,
with local gradually increasing slopes and abrupt falls. This
is caused by the 16 different maintenance trees and the fact
that only an integer amount of armatures is purchased within
the optimization horizon V
C
:
The maintenance costs per unit time curve does not
present an optimal value. It decreases continuously with
time. At the same time the renewal costs per unit time
decrease as well, however, it does step-wise. The minimal
costs per unit time are found at T
p
p
14; 500 hours with a
value of C*
3
US$ per hour. Beyond T
p
p
the expected total
costs per unit time are constant at a value of 1.022 times this
minimum.
7. Sensitivity
To check how sensitive the optimal PM interval T
p
p
was,
a sensitivity analysis was conducted for the shape parameter
b and the corrective maintenance costs C
f
; which are the two
most critical variables of the model in terms of sensitivity.
Table 6
Different maintenance probability trees
Tree no. Range T
p
Tree no. Range T
p
1 250 # T
p
, 6; 750 9 11; 750 # T
p
, 12; 000
2 6; 750 # T
p
, 8; 000 10 12; 000 # T
p
, 13; 500
3 8; 000 # T
p
, 9; 000 11 13; 500 # T
p
, 14; 500
4 9; 000 # T
p
, 9; 250 12 14; 500 # T
p
, 14; 750
5 9; 250 # T
p
, 10; 000 13 14; 750 # T
p
, 15; 250
6 10; 000 # T
p
, 10; 500 14 15; 250 # T
p
, 15; 500
7 10; 500 # T
p
, 10; 750 15 15; 500 # T
p
, 16; 750
8 10; 750 # T
p
, 11; 750 16 16; 750 # T
p
, 17; 000
Fig. 6. Results.
3
Value suppressed for comercial reasons.
B. Lhorente et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218 215
Besides, in this study C
f
was chosen equal to C
p
as the costs
of preventive and corrective reconditioning are equal for
Komatsu Chile (KC). However, for the mining company
using the trucks in their production process, these costs
would not be the same. For them, corrective maintenance is
more costly than preventive maintenance as these incur an
opportunity cost related to the unscheduled production
losses. The sensitivity analysis would make clear whether
the optimal PM interval for KC is an optimal policy for the
mining company at the same time. For the shape parameter,
b; 95% condence intervals were dened (see Table 7).
The optimal PM interval and expected costs per unit time
were calculated and the results are shown in Table 8.
From these results it can be seen that with higher values
of b the optimal PM interval decreases. However, since C*
is small, the differences in costs per hour are minimal. In
order to verify the sensitivity of C
f
; the same calculations
were made for values of C
f
times 1/3, 3, 5 and 10. The
results are shown in Table 9.
The optimal PM interval for lower values of C
f
remains
the same as the original, 14,500 h. With triple values of C
f
the optimal solution is 15,500 h. This solution is optimal for
values of C
f
until ve times the original value. In the
extreme case of 10 times the original value, the optimal PM
interval is 17,000 h. In general terms the model is not very
sensitive to changes in C
f
: Any optimal solution for KC will
be very close to optimal for the mining company as well. So
it may be concluded that:
13; 500 # T
p
p
# 16; 750; when b takes its 95% con-
dence extreme values.
14; 500 # T
p
p
# 17; 000; when C
f
takes values of 1/3
to 10 times its original value.
To analyze the models results in more detail, four
scenarios were dened and their results compared:
Base case: T
p
9; 000 h, which is the actual PM interval
of KC.
Original case: T
p
10; 000 h, which was the original PM
interval KC used in the beginning of the contract.
Optimal case: T
p
14; 500 h, which is the optimal value
according to this study.
Extreme case: T
p
17; 000 h, which is the maximum
value T
p
might take as no armatures have lasted more
than 17,000 h in between maintenance actions.
A summary of these cases is presented in Table 10.
8. Operational consequences
For the four cases, the expected amount CMs and PMs
during the useful life of an armature are the following, see
Table 11:
Taking into account the eet size and its utilization,
these numbers could be translated into amount of PMs
and CMs per year, using the following relationships
(Wong et. al. [6]).
n Amount of components in the eet.
s Amount of total maintenance (PM and CM) per
year.
tul Total useful life of an armature in terms of
operating hours
s
p
Amount of PMs per year.
s
f
Amount of CMs per year.
u Utilization in terms of operating hours per
armature per year.
Table 7
Condence interval for b
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3
b
calc
0.866 1.163 1.276
b
max
1.065 1.384 1.582
b
min
0.704 0.977 1.029
Table 8
Sensitivity of b
b
min
b
calc
b
max
T
p
p
16,500 14,500 13,500
CT
p
p
=C
p
0.993 1.000 1.022
Table 9
Sensitivity of C
f
C
f
1
3
C
f
3 C
f
5 C
f
10
T
p
p
14,500 15,500 15,500 17,000
CT
p
p
=C
p
0.873 1.194 1.381 2.657
Table 10
Comparison of cases
Base case Original case Optimal case Extreme case
T
p
9,000 10,000 14,500 17,000
CT
p
p
=C
p
1.261 1.253 1.000 1.022
Table 11
Amount of maintenance during armatures useful life
Base case Original case Optimal case Extreme case
PMs 2 2 1 1
CMs 4 4 4 4
Total 6 6 5 5
B. Lhorente et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218 216
AP Expected amount of PMs during useful life of an
armature.
AF Expected amount of CMs during useful life of an
armature.
The expected amount of total maintenance per year can
be expressed as:
s s
p
s
f
11
where;
s
p

nuAP
tul
12
s
f

nuAF
tul
In the case of KC, there are 78 armatures and the average
operating hours per year are 6,100. Applying the above
equations results in Table 12.
The total amount of maintenance per year decreases
with increasing T
p
. This holds for CMs and PMs. The
base case with T
p
9; 000 h is the worst scenario in terms
of amount of maintenance per year and the extreme case
with T
p
17; 000 h the best. Using the same methodology
and incorporating the fact that it takes approximately 12 h
to change-out an armature in case of a PM or CM,
Table 13 represents the impact of each of the four
scenarios on eet availability.
The total downtime in terms of unavailability is worst
for the base case with a total unavailability due to
armature maintenance of 13.0%. The original case
improves 0.7% with respect to the base case, the optimal
case 2.3% and the extreme case 3.0%. Although in terms
amount of maintenance and availability the extreme case
has the best results, in terms of costs this is not the case.
The annual savings with respect to the base case for the
three cases are:
Original case: US$ 5,800
Optimal case: US$ 163,900
Extreme case: US$ 153,400
This means that changing the actual PM interval to the
interval of any of the three alternative cases results in annual
savings between US$ 5,800 to 163,900. Within the three
alternatives the optimal case is best.
9. Conclusions and recommendations
New armatures experience infant mortality. On the
contrary, once maintained the armatures p.d.f. changes
dramatically, showing random failure behavior with
short expected life between successive maintenance
actions. The position of the armature on the truck (left
or right hand side) does not signicantly inuence its
failure characteristics. The dominant failure mode is
ashovers, which occur more frequently during rst
quarters. This increase in failure frequency is believed
due to the particular climatic situation during those
months.
The optimal PM interval T
p
p
is equal to 14,500 h. This
optimum moves between 13,500 and 16,750 h when varying
the shape parameter b within its 95% condence interval. At
the same time, T
p
p
moves between 14,500 and 17,000 h
when changing the cost of corrective maintenance C
f
between its extreme values.
Three feasible maintenance policies can be rec-
ommended:
The rst one is maintaining the armature preventively
every 14,500 h. This is the best policy in terms of costs
and is the optimal solution to the maintenance problem.
Total savings with respect to the actual replacement
policy are US$ 163,000 annually and, in terms of eet
availability, 2.33%.
The second one is maintaining the armature every
17,000 h. Taking into consideration that no armature so
far has lasted more than 17,000 h, this policy is
equivalent to a run to failure (on-condition) policy. The
savings with respect to the actual policy are US$
153,400 annually. This is US$ 10,600 less than would
have been saved by implementing the optimal policy.
However, the run to failure policy results in higher
eet availability. The savings in terms of availability
with respect to the actual policy are 3.0, 0.7% more
than the optimal case.
The third alternative would be to implement a run-to-
failure policy for new armatures and a PM interval for
armatures of group 2 and 3. This, however, is more
complex to administrate from a practical point of
view.
Table 13
Impact on eet availability
Base
case (%)
Original
case (%)
Optimal
case (%)
Extreme
case (%)
Unavailability 13.0 12.3 10.7 10.0
Difference
w.r.t. base case
0.0 0.7 2.3 3.0
Table 12
Expected maintenance per year
Base case Original case Optimal case Extreme case
PMs 25 21 12 10
CMs 70 69 66 63
Total 95 90 78 73
B. Lhorente et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 84 (2004) 209218 217
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the contributions and
support of Enrique Affeld, Operations Manager of Komatsu
Chile.
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