The recent trends of deployment of complex and capital intensive equipment in mines has created interest in the field of maintenance and operational reliability of this equipment. The failure consequences associated with random equipment failures have considerable influence on the total operating cost of a highly mechanized mining system. Keeping this in view, a reliability investigation was initiated for a fleet of diesel operated load-haul-dump (LHD) machines in a Swedish mine. The goal is to estimate the operational reliability of these machines, locate items or assemblies which need improvement in design to enhance the reliability and to decide the duration of optimal preventive maintenance. Failure data for one year of LHD machines are analysed using the recently developed graphical technique of total time on test (TTT) plotting. Analytical methods like Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and maximum likelihood estimation are used in the analysis. The importance of testing the reliability data for the presence of trends and serial correlation is also emphasized.
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