Remanufacturing: Critical to mining’s net

Australian mining companies will need to find more ways to decarbonise their operations. And SKF holds the key to one valuable pathway.

An important piece to the mining industry’s net-zero puzzle, the circular economy doesn’t just relate to the process of repurposing minerals from waste or tailings. There’s another important practice that gives products a new lease on life.

Remanufacturing involves returning a product to its original performance or better with warranty that’s equivalent or as good as a newly manufactured product.

In a sector that’s so equipment-dependant, the remanufacturing opportunities are endless with mining companies and contractors not only able to limit the costs of buying new but also improve their sustainability credentials and significantly reduce product lead times.

SKF has a globally renowned industrial bearing remanufacturing program. Once a bearing arrives at SKF’s remanufacturing facility in Perth, the company’s reman team goes through a staged process to remanufacture the bearing.

This includes an initial inspection, remanufacture, quality checks and reassembly, before the bearing is returned to the customer as good as new. But while the intrinsic remanufacturing process ticks several important boxes, there’s more to SKF’s solution than that.

As SKF Australia reliability specialist – remanufacturing Pratik Kandekar puts it, the company considers the remanufacturing process holistically.

“What SKF has done from a global standpoint is, based on the cost of steel and a lot of other parameters, we are able to quantify exactly what the CO2 impact of doing a remanufacturing job is versus a new bearing,” he told Australian Mining.

“As a part of our remanufacturing service we give customers a CO2 certificate which they can use when reporting their carbon emissions. A customer will have KPIs (key performance indicators) regarding their sustainability performance and this helps them to quantify it.”

Certain application conditions – such as contamination or sporadic metal-to-metal contact – can cause damage and SKF recognises a bearing’s service life is often shorter than that estimated by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

To prevent any major damage or bearing failure, SKF adopts a controlled remanufacturing process, working in collaboration with its predictive maintenance unit, harnessing the smarts of the company’s condition-monitoring capabilities to intercept a product before it reaches breaking point.

SKF industry specialist – mining Vince Broom, who is often involved with the initial bearing removal at a mine site, said the company considers several variables before commencing the remanufacturing process.

The environment with which the bearing has been used or kept in often dictates when it will be removed. Broom used the example of a recent large size bearing which had been in operation for four years and had been running at about 70–80 revolutions per minute (rpm) before being removed for remanufacture.

SKF also promises a quick turnaround, which is particularly significant given the long lead times the Australian mining sector is experiencing in the wake of COVID-19 and global geopolitical crises.

“When we’re talking about the size of the bearings we’re remanufacturing, there could be up to 8–10 months lead time for ordering new,” Rod Allen, segment manager – mining and mineral processing, told Australian Mining.

“Remanufacturing has filled that gap where we could turn around a bearing in 24 hours if we have access to that bearing quickly. Or we could drag that 8–10 months lead time down to two to three weeks.”

Allen said this can lead to significant cost savings for mining companies.

“Large coal mines, gold mines or metal-producing companies that we deal with, they could run into the millions of dollars of downtime per day (if a bearing fails), depending on what part of the plant we’re talking about. And it’s not only the damage to the bearing itself, but also to the assets.

“So if we pick up a potential bearing issue early enough with the technologies that we deploy such as condition monitoring, we’re able to salvage that bearing prior to a catastrophic failure and return that product as a remanufactured unit back to the customer in short space of time.”

As a trusted partner to the global resources sector, SKF has supported some of the world’s largest mining companies on their remanufacturing journey. Australian mining companies are turning to SKF to remanufacture their large size bearings, from slew bearings to mill bearings.

“Recently, we were able to remanufacture a large slew bearing for less than 50 per cent of its original purchase price and bring it back to new specification for them to be able to reuse or store as a critical spare with the complete warranty,” Allen said.

“We’ve also had success with big mill bearings where customers have come to us with rusted bearings from storage and we’ve remanufactured them, effectively giving them a new lease of life and reducing the product’s carbon footprint in the process.”

In the past, remanufacturing had often been considered a means to an end, with companies turning to it as a stop gap to rectify a pressing mechanical issue. But Allen is seeing a behavioural change, with the process being implemented strategically rather than reactively.

Allen said the recent success of SKF’s remanufacturing unit had been driven by current market trends relating to sustainability and cost reduction, with environmental, social and governance (ESG) obligations and rising capital expenditure important considerations.

And as mining companies further embrace the circular economy on their net-zero pursuit, SKF can be the perfect partner, whether it concerns remanufacturing or any other sustainable enterprise.

This feature appeared in the August edition of Australian Mining.

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