How safe are your relines?
How do they impact mill availability?
How can you reduce risk and shutdown duration?

Relining SAG, AG, and ball mills is a critical-path maintenance activity at many mine sites. Studies indicate that reline events can consume between 2% and 5%—and in some cases up to 10%—of annual mill availability. Furthermore, most reline operations still require personnel to work in hazardous confined spaces, exposing crews to multiple risks.

Consider this: using a standard metric of US$150,000 per hour for contained metal value in a large copper SAG mill, even just 1% downtime equates to US$13.1 million in lost processing capacity annually. Reducing reline time by 10–20 hours could add US$1.5–$3 million of extra production each year.

Relining downtime spans from mill shutdown and grind-out to when the mill is restarted. The reline duration includes several phases: knock-in, worn liner removal, new liner installation, and mill inching—that is, from the removal of the first nut to the securing of the last. Optimising these duration-related activities not only creates opportunities to improve mill availability and profitability but also reduces the hours reline crews are exposed to hazards and risk.

Explore RME’s Mill Relining Benchmarking Scorecard

Now you can discover opportunities for improvement with RME's new benchmarking scorecard. This easy-to-use, web-based tool generates a score of your reline duration, allowing sites to gauge their performance against peers operating similarly-sized mills. Then, based on your scorecard, it suggests opportunities to optimise mill relining speed and safety.

Trusted real-world industry performance data

This tool draws on an extensive, anonymised, multi-dimensional mill relining performance dataset. Collected during filmed, real-world relining operations worldwide—spanning a diverse range of SAG and ball mills, reline events, and mill relining methods and technologies—the data provides mine sites with an indicative comparison against industry peers. Productivity and safety recommendations are based on the most common opportunities for improvement observed in similarly performing sites.

Learn more about how the tool works and how to interpret your score in our Blog: Behind the Benchmark: A Fireside Chat with RME's Applications Engineering Team

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