Laser scanning for complete wear history capture and life cycle data analysis in the mining industry

Laser scanning has become an accepted and common technology for collecting spatial data on a wide range of objects. This new technology has been developed to capture the entire wear history inside grinding mills and gyratory crushers using laser scanners for data collection. Sacrificial wear liners are installed in mills and crushers and form the working components in breaking ore down to the required size. It is critical that these wear liners do not run to failure and expose the structural members behind them to damage, however it is equally important to extract as much life as possible from the liners before calling a shutdown which is expensive in cost and in downtime. Detailed and thorough analysis of the life cycle is hampered by the fact that, with conventional manual data acquisition methods, only a limited subset of the thickness measurements required for this analysis can be collected due to practical constraints. The introduction of laser scanning technology removes this constraint and instead of 10 to 20 measurements being made inside a 13 metre diameter vessel, 10 million data points can now be collected. Crucially, software development has focussed on not only processing this data to provide accurate thickness measurement but also on data extraction techniques and analysis tools to enable the critical questions to be asked and answered. For example, intelligent forecasts can now be made on how many tonnes can be processed in the future before a shutdown is required. The database of past liner life cycles is used to inform and modify the predicted behaviour of the current liner set, resulting in much more accurate and intelligent predictions. This paper will describe the data collection methodology, how the data is processed to generate useful information and some case studies where analysis of a complete life cycle has lead to substantial improvements in production and reductions in the cost of operation.