December saw another successful International Maintenance Conference (IMC), with over 1,100 participants from 41 countries. Part of the conference included the Transit Asset Management (TAM) forum, held the first day of the conference. Presented in association with the Rail Reliability and Asset Management Roundtable, the TAM forum was designed as an opportunity for agencies to share simple and practical approaches that they can put to work immediately using asset management (AM) and Industrial Internet of Things solutions (IIoT). The forum was well attended and presenters shared some highly interesting progress stories with attendees.
Although more and more industrial plants have been incorporating reliability into their vocabulary, in several cases, something has been lost in translation. More times than not, when asked about their asset reliability program, maintenance reliability organizations do not have a process in place to document asset failures, specifically the utilization of failure coding within their computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). The goal of this article is to shed light on the long-lasting benefits of documenting failure data so that organizations not doing so become the exception rather than the rule.
Until now, preventing motor failure required early retirement, as in repairing or replacing your rotating equipment on a schedule possibly years before the motor would fail. Fortunately, the declining costs of sensors and submeters, together with the growing big data industry, have made condition monitoring increasingly accurate and affordable. The net result: condition monitoring can decrease your motor operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses by up to 25 percent.1
This article describes how condition monitoring detects motor damaging situations and uses that information to maximize the life of your rotating equipment.
No doubt you have heard these terms, read articles and attended workshops and seminars to learn about these strategies. Using this information, you’ve discovered which ones will make your maintenance program more effective, reduce labor hours, reduce costs, increase equipment availability and ultimately improve production.
Based on experience gained from being around maintenance shops for many years, visiting with people in a variety of industries and talking with maintenance professionals around the globe, the conclusion formed is: There is a right time and a right place for each of these strategies.
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Greenfield Global’s ethanol plant in Varennes, Quebec, Canada, demonstrates the power of maintaining and evolving a strong reliability plan. Reliability is a key term in manufacturing that plenty of people talk about, but often find difficult to tackle in a practical way. Often, when discussing reliability, people imagine it to be achievable only for large scale, high capital organizations with a great deal of manpower. This misunderstanding stems from the misconception that reliability is a goal: just put the right equipment in place, spend enough money and somehow the plant will become reliable. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Times and thinking in the Industrial World have changed dramatically in the past three decades. Traditions that have literally been sacred cows in those post WWII years have been forgotten; witness that the “Greatest Generation” is almost a “Vanished Generation”. Technically speaking, some of this has been good and necessary – some maybe not.
Drone-based nondestructive testing allows easier, faster and inexpensive identification of flaws and defects on materials. Using location and other controls, the drones can take the same tests from the same point and angle repeatedly.
Drone-based inspection and maintenance provides a wide range of possibilities that take advantage of the mobility of the drone, as well as the nondestructive nature of the tests. These tests can help oil and gas companies identify defects and reduce the rate of failures and unplanned shutdowns.
The delicate nature of the oil and gas industry requires close and careful monitoring of its systems, such as pipelines, refineries and more. However, some traditional nondestructive testing (NDT) requires shutting down operations, as well as the repair or replacement of the test area or component.
As anyone with a hand in running a household knows, it’s important to keep a stockpile of key items. You certainly don’t want to find out the hard way that you’re on your last square of toilet paper! But in the case of a facility like a power plant, a missing spare part could be more than just a nuisance, it could be downright expensive.
Determining the appropriate spare parts to have on hand in a large facility, however, can be tricky. This is especially true after building a facility from the ground up, when you don’t have a frame of reference for which spare parts you’re most likely to need first.
Most organizations deal with this in one of two ways: 1) they guess or 2) they purchase according to a spares list provided by an equipment vendor.
The hyperscale data center segment is growing as the never-ending onslaught of data continues to require new and more agile transport systems. This need is creating a unique challenge for teams tasked with the management of assets and their lifecycles in these dynamic and sometimes dispersed hyperscale data center environments.
If you’re getting comments like these, you’re not alone. For those in the reliability field with a technical background, it can be frustrating. Your response might be, “The numbers in the spreadsheets are clear. Why is it so hard to get support from the executive team?”
Although your work is backed by hard science and a solid body of work, the fact is many others in the company may not have a good picture of what maintenance reliability professionals do to contribute to its success.
This article gives you some ideas on how you can demonstrate the value of your work and that of your team’s in order to get acceptance and support from the rest of the organization. As a result, your recommendations get followed, you get the staff and budget you need, and you’re seen as a team player.
When you look over the list of projects you’ve worked on in the last 20 or so years, it’s amazing how many involve fastener problems. Some are relatively easy to solve, especially where careless practices have resulted in fatigue failures. Other problems are much more sophisticated, such as aluminum rivets clamping aluminum sheet metal that failed from galvanic corrosion! In Part 1 of this series, a Q&A addresses some of the important points connected with common bolting practices.
As predictive maintenance teams in industrial facilities strive for a more complete picture of their equipment’s health, high frequency vibration measurements have become a crucial addition for identifying faults, such as motor and pump bearing defects and gear tooth inconsistencies in high-speed gearboxes. As a result, there is an upsurge in demand for vibration sensors with a high frequency response.
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