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Context / Scope of project
A nickel refinery with world class productivity was evaluating opportunities to increase production in an environment of high metal prices. They had evaluated an option which required significant capital expenditure to expand the tankhouse, but wanted to consider options for capacity expansion by improving performance with their existing assets.
Client achieved:
- $40 million saving in capital cost
- 4% increase in output above record production rates, with minimal capital spend
- 20% reduction in harvesting times
- 20% reduction in current efficiency losses
- 2% increase in sustainable current draws in the tankhouse
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What we did:
- Established new proactive maintenance procedures
- Implemented a procedure to identify and replace weakened anodes long before they were failing in a visible way
- Created proactive detection routines for basic failures
- Launched improved, systematic housekeeping routines
- Developed new measurement and tracking procedures for high value tankhouse metrics (e.g. current distribution)
- Reduced harvesting downtime by increasing focus on “power-off” times
- New power-off communication procedures
- High visibility KPIs, established sense of accountability and audit
- Increased current across the tankhouse as current efficiency and current distribution improved due to improvement initiatives
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