Browsing by Author "Knights, PF"

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    Labor productivity and comparative advantage in mining: The copper industry in Chile
    (ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2001) Garcia, P; Knights, PF; Tilton, JE
    Over the past two decades, the copper industry has enjoyed dramatic increases in labor productivity in both Chile and the United States. Recent research attributes most of the increase in the United States to innovation and technological change, rather than the exploitation of higher quality copper deposits due to the development of new mines and a shift in output from low to high productivity mines.
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    Open systems standards for computing in the mining industry
    (CANADIAN INST MINING METALLURGY PETROLEUM, 2000) Knights, PF; Daneshmend, LK
    Key issues in managing information systems in the minerals industry will likely continue to be those relating to the integration and interoperability of disparate systems. This paper argues that, in order to harness the promised benefits of information technologies, the mining industry should adopt a set of open systems standards to define data formats and protocols for seamless data exchange. This is in direct contrast to the present situation where mining equipment, software and instrument suppliers rigidly adhere to proprietary standards for fear of losing competitive advantage. Benefits to the mining sector resulting from the adoption of such standards would be: the provision of near-time data for executive decision support and the freedom to choose best technologies. The principal benefits to the leading mining software suppliers will be increased market share as a result of "captive sites " converting to open systems standards, Examples are given of open systems standards developed for related industries such as the Petroleum Open Systems Corporation (POSC) and the Machinery information Management Open Systems Alliance (MIMOSA).
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    Reliability model for the optimal replacement of shovel cables
    (INST MINING METALLURGY, 1999) Knights, PF; Segovia, RA
    A reliability model has been developed for the optimal replacement of mining shovel cables on the basis of adherence to a replacement policy governed by number of hours. Change-out times are determined that minimize the expected cost per operating hour for cable replacements. The model is generic in nature and can be applied to non-repairable components subject to wear that have high capital and installation costs and do not lend themselves to continuous condition monitoring. The model incorporates the effect of periodic inspections and provides a methodology for the calculation of confidence intervals associated with replacement times and hourly operating costs.
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    Simulation of initiatives to improve mine maintenance
    (INST MINING METALLURGY, 2001) Louit, DM; Knights, PF
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    Statistical correlation of off-highway tire failures with openpit haulage routes
    (SOC MINING METALLURGY EXPLORATION INC, 2001) Knights, PF; Boerner, AL
    Off-highway tire costs represent a significant portion of the total mining costs in openpit, truck-shovel operations. To extend the lives of tires, the site-specific factors influencing tire life should be investigated. Valuable data can be obtained by combining historical operational data captured by a mine dispatch system with detailed tire and maintenance histories. Assuming that failure counts satisfy a Poisson distribution, F-tests can be applied to determine significant deviations from desired or target counts.