DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR SUGARCANE HARVESTERSFAILURE PREDICTION

Abstract

The general objective of this study is developing and improving the performance of sugarcane harvester by management of maintenance, for the purpose of increasing availability and reliability of harvester and decreasing cost of maintenance and repair, by developing mathematical and an analytical, user-friendly model for sugarcane harvester failures analysis and management, using Gamma distribution for failures. The developed algorithm of Gamma distributions for failures analysis looks on the sequence of events (failures), defined as transition between states, and calculates the relative probability of encountering these events in short-run (partial), medium (combined) and long-run (complete). Hence, the algorithm is used to evaluate reliability and availability of sugarcane harvester with time-dependent transition rates using analytical distributions matrix –based methods. The developed procedure is written in Microsoft Excel (Spread sheet) operating environment. With the software the user will have the ability to manipulate and analyze the data directly using customized menus and point and click mouse operation. To verify model accuracy, its basic functional relations of model (Gamma distributions matrix) are compared with Amri and McLanghim model (2004), and results showed no mathematical difference between two models. The failures analysis model is run using failure data of two sugarcane Harvesters collected from two study sites (Guneid factory and New Halfa factory workshops), the purpose is to investigate and evaluate performance of the studied sugarcane harvester, with respect to the stander of maintenance in these two workshops using three proxy indicators (maximum time before failure, dependability and availability). The result showed that, the dependability as function of the sugarcane Harvester, makes is of significant impact on maximum time before failure for all Harvester while the sugarcane harvester of Guneid is the most reliable with a 50 % Availability of 19 hours of time before failures and sugarcane Harvester of Sinnar showed at 50 % Availability a value of 15 hours of time before failures.