Why would leak prevention be important in the mining industry?
In today’s ever challenging mining market, cost management is now front and center. The use of scheduled maintenance can only take you so far.
There is a new school of thought on this front. Maximizing the life span of equipment to get the full value of the wear components, taking into account the safety tolerances of the design and avoiding catastrophic failures.
Leak prevention in the mining environment is the solution which focuses on extending the useful life of piping to the time just before it becomes an expensive cleanup, a hazard and in a useless state.
Exceeding the useful life of piping in the mining environment is something that happens on an everyday basis. Even the best planned maintenance practices will fail to identify problematic area’s or cannot identify if the maintenance process has been executed to schedule.
Once a leak occurs there are severe repercussion, costly repairs due to rush parts and general production loss are some of the most often seen results. Injury or loss of life are also potentials due to failure in piping.
The ability to identify a worn liner with many days or weeks available for replacement part re-order, in a mill situation, is the future of mill maintenance.
In an underground situation the ability to identify the remaining useful steel in a paste fill or sand-fill operation can mean the prevention of loss of life or a large expensive cleanup.
Everyone can benefit from leak prevention technology, extend the useful life of wear components, save maintenance costs and insure against property damage while conserving the environment.
Leak Prevention systems are available for bare steel pipe, hardened pipe as well as rubber lined pipe.