Reliability-based maintenance scheduling of haulage system of drum shearer

Drum shearer is the most important component of production chain in longwall mining. This machine is driven along the face by a powerful haulage system. In this paper, the reliability of haulage system of shearer has been analysed. The result showed that Time Between Failures (TBF) data of this system obeys the three-parameter Weibull distribution. On the basis of the achieved reliability model, the Preventive Maintenance (PM) scheduling has been suggested for different reliability levels. The reliability-based maintenance intervals for 90, 80, 70 and 50% reliability are 19.4, 35, 49 and 96.8 h, respectively. If 35 h are considered as the PM intervals, mean TBF will be increased by 16.2%.