Articles

Journey Toward Reliability Starts with Uptime Elements

Central Contra Costa Sanitary District (Central San) is an organization providing wastewater collection and treatment for over 481,600 residents and 3,000 businesses in Contra Costa County, California, located about 25 miles from San Francisco. Central San’s main facility is a treatment plant in Martinez, California, processing an average of 32 million gallons per day of municipal wastewater and providing up to three million gallons per day of recycled water to several businesses in the community.

Work Execution Management

A Health Care’s Journey to the NFPA 99 Risk Assessment

At a recent Reliability Chapter meeting, a gentleman boldly stated, “If you threw all your preventative maintenance (PM) out the door, your productivity would shoot through the roof.” The reaction by most people in the room was to articulate why this is illogical.

Asset Management

Asset Performance Management Defined

If you work for an asset intensive organization and your role involves ensuring value from assets, you are unlikely to organize the world by software applications as software marketing professionals or software analysts’ do in order to describe these applications and functions to chief information officers, IT leaders or other chief officers.

Asset Management

Q&A with Vilma A. Rosado

A native of Lajas, Puerto Rico, Vilma Rosado joined the workforce as a process engineer in the electronics industry in 1998. Over the next 20 years, she has worked for the U.S. government, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson and now as a Senior Manager level, individual contributor at BioMarin Pharmaceutical, Inc. Vilma is passionate about high performance teams and assets, and has a continuous commitment and interest in reliability engineering and asset management.

Internet of Things Digitalization (IoT)

Perfecting the Water Industry: Advanced Process Control Without a PhD

In any process automation & control industry, the most widely used control algorithm is proportional-integral-derivative (PID), according to National Instruments. PID control has been widely adopted throughout industrial control markets, dating back to the beginning of trying to optimize any process.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Bad Actor Program

Reliability engineering is about predicting failures and providing ground for decision-making related to preventive maintenance optimization (PMO), lifecycle costing, spare parts forecasting, and reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) modeling. Different tools are available to the reliability engineer for such levels of predictions. The benefit of these tools comes from proper planning and management plans to cope with future issues.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

How the Quest for Better Pumps Came to (Almost) Nothing: Part 2

Part 1 in the June/July 2019 Uptime issue closed with the experience-based statement that failure risk can escalate by certain specification practices, including some contained in API 610. Without going into the many possible reasons for bearing life reductions, the quest for better bearings in upgraded process pumps elicits several observations that should be considered when preparing a modern pump specification.

Internet of Things Digitalization (IoT)

The Hidden Front Line of Cyberattacks: Industrial Control Systems

It’s a quiet December afternoon in 2015. In the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Western Ukraine, workers are preparing to finish their day and make their way home into a cold night. Inside the Prykarpattyaoblenergo control center, which distributes power to the region’s residents, operators are nearing the end of their shift. Suddenly, an unprecedented series of cyberattacks takes place as they watch in amazement. The attacks eventually knock out parts of Ukraine’s electric grid, thus cutting the power to nearly a quarter of a million residences.

Articles

Journey Toward Reliability Starts with Uptime Elements

A Health Care’s Journey to the NFPA 99 Risk Assessment

The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Start Small Win Big

Data Farming: A Way to Maximize Use of Data for Machinery Condition Monitoring

Featured Reliability Leader: Greg Bentley