Open Collections

Evaluation of equipment reliability, availability and maintainability in an oil sands processing plant

University of British Columbia

The oil sands industry is a developing sector of Canada’s economy; one area of focus for oil sands companies is to improve plant maintenance and overall plant availability. Although considerable progress has been made in the improvement of plant maintenance in other industries, oil sands and mining companies in general do not significantly benefit from this due to variable feed supply that impacts plant performance. As well historically for mining maintenance has not been done well. The work presented in this thesis develops a framework for understanding oil sands processing plant key equipment failures by utilizing data collected over two years at Albian Sands Energy Inc, an operator of an oil sands mine in Alberta, Canada. The data is used to calculate mean time between maintenance for key pieces of oils sand processing equipment. As well various statistical techniques are applied to the data to identify the best maintenance strategies for the site. Finally the efficacy of advanced statistical techniques, such as Power Law modeling, for predicting time to next failure for equipment is demonstrated.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-04-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7527

Mining Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/