RELIABILITY IMPROVEMENT THROUGH SMART LONGWALLS PROJECT Zhiqiang Guan and Hal Gurgenci Introduction Coal produced by Longwall mining is almost 30% of the total coal production in Australia, distributed between NSW and QLD and with production tonnage and face numbers as shown in Figure 1. Traditionally, Australian longwall miners have favoured large equipment to keep the unit costs down. While this enabled longwall production to enjoy productivity figures approaching those for some open cut mines in Australia, the low availability and utilization have made it difficult to extract maximum use from installed capacity. Typical downtime figures in Australian longwalls are around 60% of the calendar time, most of which are associated with face equipment failures. Therefore, a critically important element of the Australian drive towards catching up with world’s best practice in higher utilization of the installed capacity, is improving face equipment reliability. Fig.1 Longwall face number & production in NSW and QLD (Joint Coal Board) CRC Mining Smart Longwalls Project is aiming to achieve a significant increase in longwall productivity by improving the reliability of face equipment to benefit its members. The immediate target for reliability improvement of face equipment is to quickly identify the failures and their root cause by modeling, date collection and analysis, fault detection, and condition monitoring. The long-term target is to eliminate some faults by re-design & re-engineering, fault prediction and automatic avoidance of the fault.