Wear detection is what turns a raw measurement into a maintenance decision. Wear liners are consumables, designed to be consumed. The hazard is that remaining thickness cannot be seen from outside: a liner is assessed by eye, tap or a few shutdown measurements, and between shutdowns it wears.
What the problem really costs
Plan the reline on the calendar and you bin good steel; guess the other way and the shell absorbs it unplanned.
S5 System’s WearMon is a thin flexible printed circuit fitted to the wear surface, so its electrical signature tracks the material remaining and reports a trend. Construction detail is released under NDA.
Where the wear detection approach differs
Built by S5 System Pty Ltd (s5system.com); published by S5 Consultants, our assurance arm.
How do you decide when a wear plate has done its job?
Getting started
Wear detection is not a technology decision, it is an operating decision. The sites that get value from it pick one or two assets that genuinely matter, instrument them properly, and wire the result into a maintenance routine somebody already owns. Start with the failure that costs the most per hour of downtime and work outward from there.
That sequence — one asset, one measurement, one owner — is what separates a programme that survives its first review from another pilot that quietly stops reporting. The engineering is rarely the hard part; sustaining the routine is.
If you are weighing options, bring the failure mode and the cost of an hour of downtime. Those two numbers are enough to scope a first deployment and to judge whether it earned its place at the next budget review.
Where this fits
Related S5 capability: WearMon product page.
Cross-published from the S5 System LinkedIn stream (2026-10-12). Follow us on LinkedIn for the original post.
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WearMon
Real-time wear-liner and wear-plate thickness monitoring — stop sending people up the chute to measure wear.
Instrument one critical asset for 90 days and get a defensible condition-monitoring business case you can take to your superintendent. A$4,900, fixed scope, consultancy-led.