Critical Connections

About this title

Have you ever experienced a situation where you do everything you know to prevent failures but remain unsuccessful? I recall a case where we were performing RCM on a heat exchanger in a chemical plant, and we found that plant personnel were using a technique that identified wall thinning on tubes when they were actually looking for cracking. They had been doing it for years and were always surprised that they never caught the deterioration in time to prevent an unplanned outage.

In this case, the people at the plant did what they knew how to do rather than what was really needed. To prevent failures, they needed to use a technique that looked for the kind of deterioration that is actually occurring.

To do this, you need to determine the actual failure mode that caused failures in the past. Then you need to determine the kind of failure mechanism that is causing the deterioration. Then you need to select a tool that actually finds the form of deterioration when it is occurring and can evaluate the current status of deterioration. Finally, you need to be able to trigger preventive maintenance after most of the useful life of the component has been used, but before the asset fails. It is all linked together. To be successful, you must be specific and accurate.

When you are working with lots of systems and failure modes, the only way to get ahead is to automate the process. This book describes ways to use your current systems to capture the data needed to accurately link failures to their solutions.

Acerca del Autor - Daniel T. Daley

My name is Daniel T. Daley. Friends call me Dan. I am from Omaha Nebraska. I attended the University of Nebraska and graduated in 1971 with a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering and a commission in the US Air Force. After serving a tour as an Air Force officer (in Selma Alabama and Osan Korea), I returned to school at the University of Missouri, Columbia. There I received a MS in Mechanical Engineering.

My career began with Shell Oil Company where I held a variety of positions in engineering, maintenance and operations. I held the position of Director of Maintenance and Reliability for several companies including Shell, OxyChem and Valero. I retired from Union Pacific railroad were I was the Director of Locomotive Engineering and Quality. For the last five years I have been providing consulting services through my company My Reliability Team based on concepts contained in my books to a variety of clients. I am always looking for more clients.

All of my assignments have focused on reliability and maintenance engineering. In these roles, I have had the opportunity to supervise some very good young engineers. During those experiences, there were frequent occasions I wished I have some brief yet direct books for them to use to supplement the person-to-person training I was providing. The books I have written are intended to fill that void.

Services in support of applying the concepts described in these books are available from My Reliability Team.

Contents

Introduction

1: Definitions
2: The Failure to Solution Process
3: The Role a Failure Mode Plays in a Failure
4: The Part a Failure Mechanism Plays in Producing a Failure Mode
5: Linking a Failure Mechanism to Forms of Predictive and Preventive Maintenance
6: Measuring Deterioration Using Predictive Maintenance
7: Intervening Before Failure Using Preventive Maintenance
8: Integrating Data in Your Information System
9: Putting It All Together
10: Moving from Being Reactive to Proactive
11: The Permanent Solution
Conclusion
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
References for Further Reading
Index
Bio