Articles: Reliability Engineering

5 Minute Audio Tip - Rules of Thumb for Maintenance and Reliability Engineers

Ricky Smith, CMRP explains Rules of Thumb for Maintenance and Reliability Engineers

Blast Off to Reliability

The RCM Process at United Space Alliance

by Catherine C. Kammerer

United Space Alliance, LLC (USA) is the Space Processing Operations Contractor (SPOC) for NASA at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), and Johnson Space Center (JSC).   In that role, United Space Alliance uses Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) to optimize maintenance practices for the upkeep of tens of thousands of pieces of critical ground support, launch, and flight control equipment.  USA has an institutionalized RCM process with a company policy, functional organization procedures, periodic review of performance, and metrics to track the performance.

Detective Maintenance

When we think about maintenance strategies, the words predictive, preventive, corrective, and breakdown spring to mind. There is however an important class of tasks that we do to ensure that our equipment and Plant remains safe and productive. These tasks are based on a Detective Maintenance strategy. They help us win our licence-to-operate and ensure long term viability. With machinery and Plants becoming increasingly more complex, the proportion of such tasks in the total maintenance program is growing.

Managing a business efficiently means that we have to manage risks well. In turn, this requires that our safety devices and systems work on demand. It is possible to arrive logically at the required availability of the items in question and find suitable detective maintenance strategies. While analysis is relatively easy, there are several hurdles in implementing their results. These challenges can be met by a range of solutions. They are not universal and need to be tailored to each situation.

The word pro-active is very popular, especially in the maintenance context. Detective Maintenance strategies are pro-active. More importantly, they are essential to long term success.

 

Failure Mapping

A New And Powerful Tool For Improving Reliability And Maintenance by Daniel T. Daley

Excerpt courtesy of Industrial Press Inc.

 

Failure Mapping is a system that recognizes patterns of events or conditions that have a direct relationship with subsequent failures. The ability to describe the meaningful elements of those patterns with high accuracy and then to recognize the relationship between them and a failure depends on the ability to capture simple unadorned facts. This book describes a process that fills those needs more completely than other approaches by detailed examination of events, a process that is known as Failure Mapping.

Integrated Reliability Tools Give Asset Managers Decision Making Power

Asset managers are able to use reliability simulation packages to make informed decisions on managing their assets to achieve their business goals. Integration has been a key feature of recent developments between Reliability methods and also between the integrated package and Enterprise Reliability Systems. Integration between methods in the Availability Workbench package means that RCM analysis is integrated with Weibull data analysis, the RCM is integrated with Reliability Block Diagrams and both are linked to Lifecycle costs calculations. Integration with Enterprise asset Management such as SAP, Mincom Ellipse and IBM's Maximo provides the means to use the source data held in the Enterprise System to make proactive decisions and store the outputs of the reliability decision making system in the
Enterprise system.

MARCON-2009 Photos

MARCON-2009 Photos

Operating Philosophy and Reliability

Operational reliability - that is what we actually achieve in our Plants, is almost always lower than the intrinsic reliability that the Plants were designed and built to achieve. To bridge this gap, some managers look for silver bullets. Thus RCM, TPM, Six Sigma or some other process is selected to improve reliability performance. If these are not part of a well thought out plan, sustained results are hard to achieve. The plan will follow steps such as those described below.

Reliability Centered Design

Designing for Reliability and Maintenance

Bruce Dean, CMRP
Manager, Design Engineering
Ramesh C. Gulati, PE, CMRP
Manager, Asset Mgmt. & Reliability Planning
AEDC / ATA
Arnold Air Force Base, TN 37389

 

Abstract

One of the key factors in asset/system performance is its reliability- “inherent reliability” or designed in reliability. Are we designing the system with reliability and maintenance in mind? The O&M cost, which is typically about 80% of the total life cycle cost of the system, becomes fixed –whether intentionally or not- during the early design phase. Are we specifying the reliability and maintenance needs in our requirements document before the design phase begins? The reliability & maintainability are design attributes that should be designed into the assets to minimize maintenance needs by using reliable components, simpler replacements and easier inspections.

Introduction

Having high reliability of assets /plants is essential to the success of any organization, particularly with respect to its overall operations and maintenance cost. Understanding reliability and maintenance and how they’re interrelated is important.

Reliability focuses on the ability of an asset to perform its intended function to support manufacturing a product or providing a service. Reliability terminates with a failure —i.e., when unreliability occurs. Unreliability results in high cost to the organization.

Maintenance is an act of maintaining, or the work of keeping the asset in proper –operational condition. Maintenance is a “field” action and may consist of performing maintenance inspection and repair to keep assets operating in a safe manner to produce or provide the designed capabilities. So maintenance is to keep assets in an acceptable working condition, to prevent them from failing, and if they fail, bring them back to their operational level effectively and as quickly as needed.

Reliability in Design

Originally presented at Reliability 2.0

by Vince Adorno, CMRP, Alcoa Primary Metals V.P Engineering/Maintenance & Claudia Faye, CMRP, Alcoa Reliability Engineer

When Reliability philosophies, theories and practices are integrated into the Capital Management Process, dramatic results are achieved. Equipment Reliability needs to start in the concept phase of a new plant or system and continue through design, construction, start-up and operations. When done correctly this process results in a far more reliable production facility that will produce more output at a lower cost.

Saving Cost by Reducing Reliability?

The Relationship Between Reliability and Maintenance Costs

Introduction

When we say Reliability, do we actually mean Availability? Under certain circumstances, the two are numerically the same, but that is only in a specific set of cases. 

Utilizing Advanced Statistical Reliability Methods to Improve Overall Asset Performance

By Mark Latino

Event data analysis can be a very useful in understanding how and when assets fail. It can also provide insight to help plant personnel understand what action to take and when to take it. In other words, it helps in the process of building a strategy for asset performance management.

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