Coal Handling Facility

A large coal handling/loading site needed a convenient means to check, for maintenance planning purposes, the implications of taking electrical equipment out of service.

The site has numerous conveyors organised into various streams and several different substations. The conveyors and associated auxiliaries in each stream are typically fed from several of the substations so it is not immediately obvious if, for example, a transformer is taken out of service, what combination of streams can be run.

PCE was commissioned to develop an application where the planners could check what stream combinations could be run when a major piece of electrical equipment went out of service.

Technical challenges included the long DOL starting time of some conveyors (partly mitigated by fluid couplings) which made it possible to have some combinations of conveyors running, but not have them starting. Another challenge was having conveyors starting full of coal, extending the acceleration time and thus causing some protection to pick up and begin timing.

The application allows planners to more easily plan outages for electrical maintenance.