W.S.G. Isaac Newton

Optimizing Maintenance and Design of a Track Conveyor at Heavy Equipment Rental N.V.

The maintenance at Production Line 1 at the aggregate mine of Heavy Equipment Rental N.V. was done on a run-to-failure basis and a lot of improvements could be made. That is why checklists and manuals were created to more efficiently monitor the equipment and save the data to ultimately be able to make predictions about component lifetime. These checklists and manuals were created based on discussions with operators at the production line as well as more experienced engineers at the company. The first edition of these checklists and manuals was designed to be used on paper initially but moved to a digital version quickly after so everything could be monitored more easily, which currently is not possible yet due to a lack of access to the internet at the mine. This internship concludes with completed checklists and manuals ready for implementation, paving the way for further enhancements and predictive maintenance efforts.

The next part of the report is about the design of a track conveyor to be used in the harbour of DP World. This assignment was on a very tight schedule, having only 3 days for the concept design and about 3 weeks until completion. For this design, a lot of old parts were repurposed like a conveyor belt and excavator tracks as well as various other components. Some specific requirements had to be met, including a minimal height restriction, no ground contact during operation, transportability, stability and adjustable height which had to reach at least 7.5 meters. The design process itself includes calculations on the stability of the construction as well as the location of hydraulic cylinders and supporting tubes by creating a model in SolidWorks. After a model was created, further calculations were done to determine the forces the track conveyor was subjected to in its different configurations. The track conveyor was finished in about 3 weeks and was able to meet the requirements set at the start of the project and it is currently in use at the DP World harbour.

I thoroughly enjoyed the internship at HER in Suriname and it was an amazing place to work for the 11 weeks of the internship. The people at the company were very welcoming and even outside of the work environment we were able to enjoy our time together in Suriname.