Agitator Failure Predictions (Good Vibrations)

The Problem Autoclaves are high pressure and high-temperature circuits used for separating sulfide materials from gold, and each autoclave includes seven agitators. An agitator failure is both dangerous and costly. When an agitator fails, the entire plant must shut down, which can cost $150,000 per hour. Due to the autoclaves' importance, sensors monitor the agitators constantly, collecting a wealth of data that we were able to analyze. We built a machine learning algorithm to predict when an agitator was likely to fail, enabling timely preventative repairs. The Model