fleet of Komatsu 830 trucks from 5,500
to 8,000 hours by using a tire pressure
monitoring system to help them man-
age tire pressures.
Remote monitoring of the tire pres-
sure reduces the required maintenance
hours needed to manually check every
tire in a fleet. This frees up mechanics or
tire men to attend to "real" issues in a
more timely and effective manner.
Using a monitoring system to extend
fleet tire life also has the added benefit of
reducing capital invested in tire inventory.
A fleet of 20 trucks running on $300,000
worth of tires results in $6 million of
rolling rubber. Depending on a mine's
philosophy of inventory to keep the fleet
running the capital savings resulting from
increased life and resulting in reduced
inventory can be significant.
Employing a monitoring system to
maintain optimum tire pressure also
reduces fleet fuel consumption, although
there doesn't seem to be a lot of informa-
tion on earthmoving tire pressure and
fuel efficiency, many studies have been
documented for passenger tires. An infor-
mal study by students at Carnegie Mellon
University found that the majority of cars
on U.S. roads are operating on tires inflat-
ed to only 80% of capacity. According to
www.fueleconomy.gov, inflating tires to
their proper pressure can improve
mileage by about 3.3%, whereas leaving
them under-inflated can lower mileage
by 0.4% for every one PSI drop in pres-
s u r f a c e m a i n t e n a n c e c o n t i n u e d
42 www.coalage.com December 2014
The bearing temperature display on a BE495 shovel allows an operator and the maintenance office to main-
tain awareness of bearing temperatures and alerts.