Remote Sensing Increases Truck Productivity

Finding it difficult to perform wheel inspection of off-highway trucks, Vale’s Serra Norte predictive maintenance team decided to invest in innovation and technology that would bring improvements in this process.

In the second half of 2020, in partnership with Dynamox, Vale decided to install wireless vibration and temperature sensors, the DynaLoggers HF, to solve safety and vehicle downtime problems, enabling data collection remotely.

Before, monitoring was done manually and offline, involving at least five professionals from different areas.

The technician had to remove the sprocket from the wheel and disassemble the housing in order to attach the accelerometer and start collecting data. Besides being a high-risk procedure, the inspection took about two hours, impacting production.

Remote monitoring gains

With the investment in sensor technology, the device is now fixed inside the motorized wheel and stores the vibration, temperature, and speed data in its internal memory.

These information can be collected via bluetooth, from a nearby cell phone or Ipad, or it can migrate remotely, via a network, to the mine’s office computers. 

In this way, there has been a drastic reduction in accident risks and a significant gain in vehicle productivity.

The investment generated a longer useful life to the components, agility, and mainly, more safety to the collaborators’ lives.

Because of the good results, the technology was also taken to the excavator wheel inspection process.

With this new feature, the predictive maintenance team’s intention is to eliminate the maintenance technician’s exposure to accident risks and ensure more sustainable operations and predictability of the mine’s assets. 

“Being part of this digital transformation that our mining environments are undergoing is very gratifying. We are at the forefront of predictive 4.0 in Carajás, putting technology to the benefit of our operations,” says George Bueno, from the Serra Norte inspection and predictive team. 

Learn more about DynaLoggers and their benefits in industrial asset monitoring or request a quotation.

Source: Vale