UWA - Blakers Lecture Theatre( MATH:G18

Reliability engineers make critical decisions about when and how to maintain conveyor belts; decisions that can significantly impact the production of the mine. The engineers use thickness measurements across the belt's width to justify these decisions. However, the current approaches to forecast the wear of the conveyor belts are naive and throw away valuable information about the spacial wear characteristics of the conveyor. Ryan has developed a new method for forecasting belt wear that retains the wear profile's spacial structure and considers the wear rate's heterogeneity - caused by operation and ore body composition variations.