Candelaria is a large copper-gold mine owned by Freeport-McMoRan. It is located near Copiapó in northern Chile's Atacama province. It has one crushing plant, and produces approximately 200,000 tonnes of copper concentrates per year. Therefore, if the crusher is down, it can lead to serious consequences in production loss.
The mine purchased four ToothMetricsTM + ViewMetricsTM systems for their entire shovel fleet after learning the success of the Motion Metrics systems at other Phelps Dodge/Freeport properties in Arizona and New Meixco, USA.
The ToothMetricsTM + ViewMetricsTM systems were installed and commissioned on one P&H 4100 and three P&H 2800 cable shovels in May 2006.
The electricians in Candelaria have been doing an excellent job in maintaining the four ToothMetricsTM systems. Over the last three years, the ToothMetricsTM systems have detected countless number of missing teeth for the mine.
On Sunday, May 4, 2008, Shovel #11 was digging in the ore area. Within 3 hours, the ToothMetricsTM system on this shovel detected 3 missing teeth incidents, and notified the shovel operator in a timely manner each time. The below three images show the actual screenshots as seen by the operator:
The streak started at 12:46:22 on that Sunday afternoon. Shovel #11 lost a tooth, the ToothMetricsTM system alarmed the operator to avoid the tooth from being sent to the crusher. Soon the tooth was replaced, and the shovel operator was back at work again.
At 13:57:44, the system detected another missing tooth. The shovel operator followed the same procedure.
At 15:33:09, the system detected the third missing tooth. All three missing teeth came within 3 hours from the same shovel digging in ore area. Without ToothMetricsTM, these three teeth would have been transported to the crusher along with the ore.
The Candelaria maintenance crew and the management were all excited that the ToothMetricsTM system is safeguarding their shovels against these missing teeth incidents. A Mine Technology Manager in the Freeport-McMoRan corporate office, after reviewing this sequence of events, sent the following email to Motion Metrics and the Candelaria crew:
“ Three teeth in 3 hours at Candelaria, and the system responded in one minute in one case,
22 seconds in another, and 32 seconds in the third… All the hard work by Motion Metrics and the Candelaria
crew is paying huge dividends. That was flawless, way to go.”