Mid Sweden University

Sund Birsta AB is a Swedish company that develops, markets and delivers a wide range of equipment, from single machines to complete handling systems for the steel industry. As a world leading machine manufacturer with machines all over the world it’s important for Sund Birsta to assist their customers with a first-class service that includes a good life expectancy assessment of wear parts. The overall purpose of the project is to develop a tool that is able to make a good estimation of the life span of Sund Birsta’s wear parts. The main goal is to create a concept for a method, rather than a finished, ready to use prototype. The initial stage in this project is to select a machine or machine element according to predetermined criteria and make the method as general as possible to be able to apply it to other machine elements. The project resulted in a concept consisting of data collection, analysis, storage and evaluation of data. The concrete and variable goals were met and a steady foundation for a future quality tool was developed. There is still a lot of work to do before a complete tool is ready for use but the concept is in such a state that it can be used to start collecting and analyzing data. Some data collecting methods need more work before it can be executed, for example the Programmable Logic-Controller-data (PLC-data), while maintenance and service data is ready for collection. When more data is collected it will be possible to start using it for life expectancy assessment by, for example, linear regression or other data analyzing methods.