Reduced Digging Efficiency

As a mining shovel engages the mine face, its bucket teeth gradually wear down and need to be replaced at the right time. Bucket teeth are considered the sacrificial components of the shovel GET (Ground Engagement Tool). Continued operation with worn shovel teeth reduces shovel efficiency, resulting in increased cutting forces, longer fill times, damage to the bucket, and an increased likelihood of missing teeth and adapters. Traditional methods of tooth wear monitoring require mine personnel to physically measure the length of each tooth. An unplanned tooth change-out can result in hours of unexpected downtime costing the mine significantly more than a planned change-out.

Continuous Monitoring

Using a rugged camera mounted on the shovel, the bucket teeth are continuously monitored. An in-cab monitor provides real-time, teeth status updates using a tooth-line indicator. As a result, reliance on periodic visits or visual inspection of the conditions are eliminated.

With MetricsManager™ Pro connectivity, the status of each shovel tooth is logged regularly. Data analysis can determine length, wear rate, the wear pattern, and the estimated time to change each tooth.

Minimize Downtime

Predicting the change-out of a tooth before it occurs allows shovel downtime to be planned. In doing so, several maintenance tasks can be performed simultaneously and overall downtime can be minimized. In addition, the need to manually measure each tooth multiple times per day is eliminated. ShovelMetrics™ Tooth Wear Monitoring monitors shovel teeth in real-time, calculating their lengths and predicting when the tooth will need to be replaced.

Predict Tooth Change Outs

MetricsManager™ Pro is a centralized web-based solution designed to manage and analyze information collected directly from Motion Metrics embedded systems.
MetricsManager™ Pro for Tooth Wear Monitoring allows management to:

• Review system performance by monitoring logs, ensuring the system is capturing and processing images frequently
• Input data to select an optimal tooth length before change-out occurs
• Generate Tooth Wear Prediction Reports that feature analysis of each shovel tooth, its last replacement, current tooth length, critical tooth length and a valuable prediction of each tooth’s next wear-out date