Articles

M2M Strategies for Machine Tool Maintenance

Spindles are one of the most expensive and sophisticated rotating components on the planet. They rotate at super high speeds with fits and tolerances 10 to 20 times what is required on other rotating devices, such as pumps or motors. If there ever were machines that needed to communicate their health and activity it would be spindles.

Leadership for Reliability

Using Performance and Development to Sustain Performance Improvements

The road to better manufacturing performance is littered with well-meaning improvement efforts that fall short. In some cases, initial progress fizzles out due to a lack of structure and incentives. In others, the workforce never embraces the desired change, viewing it as a top-down directive rather than an initiative they can truly own. Although executives often recognize emerging issues that impede improvement, developing and executing strategies that effectively address those issues have proved to be a recurring challenge.

Leadership for Reliability

A Journey to Shape Reliability Excellence at Bristol-Myers Squibb - Part 3

This installment shows how the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (BMS) aligned its central efforts with the reliability strategy. It continues the journey from Part 1 in Uptime’s December/January 2016 issue describing the initial implementation of Uptime Elements at BMS and Part 2 in Uptime’s February/March 2016 issue demonstrating how the sites began to adopt and utilize Uptime Elements as a communication tool to set strategy and align reliability efforts with their specific site goals. This seemingly hands-off approach helped to create an organic culture with a sense of ownership for the sites while still maintaining a consistent approach globally.

Asset Condition Management

The Role of Machinery Protection Systems

In today’s industrial environment, most turbomachinery has permanently installed machinery protection systems that incorporate vibration monitoring instrumentation. These systems typically utilize proximity probes to monitor both radial and thrust events (i.e., relative vibration measurements), case mounted seismic vibration transducers (i.e., absolute vibration measurements) and a shaft speed/phase reference measurement. By incorporating the preexisting machinery protection systems’ available measurement types into a routine vibration analysis program, technicians can determine specific fault types and machine condition based on signal amplitudes, frequency content and phase relationships between machine components. Additionally, these measurements can be acquired for machine commissioning purposes after mechanical repairs/inspections and utilized for machinery diagnostics with the use of multi-channel transient vibration analysis techniques.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

RCM: On-Condition Task Interval Determination

The highly structured RCM process is a proven approach for determining what must be done to any physical asset to ensure it continues to do what you want it to do in the present operating context. The first step of the task selection process starts by assessing the effects of the failure mode and classifying them into one of four broad categories of consequences. The next step identifies a proactive task that reduces the consequences of failure to the extent that it is technically feasible. The criteria used to judge whether an on-condition maintenance task is technically feasible are fairly consistent across the various compliant RCM processes. Specifically, RCM2™ uses the following yardsticks:

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Q&A with an Industry Leader - Susan Lubell & Ricky Smith

Uptime Magazine caught up with Susan Lubell and Ricky Smith, authors of the recently published book, “Root Cause Analysis Made Simple.” They shared some of the most frequently asked questions regarding root cause analysis (RCA) that are asked by not only maintenance practitioners, but also their production operations teams and management, who they need to support them in their work.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Uptime Award Winners 2015

Recognizing the Best of the Best!

Uptime Magazine congratulates the following outstanding programs for their commitment to and execution of high quality Predictive Maintenance and Condition Monitoring Programs.

To read more about each company, download the Uptime Award Winners’ stories at: uptimeawards.com.

Asset Condition Management

How High Performance Oils and Greases Extend the Application Range for Sealed Bearings

The development of high performance perfluoropolyether (PFPE) lubricants dates back a few decades. These developments were both necessitated and accelerated by aerospace and aviation markets where lubrication at the extremes of low and high temperatures was far more important than it would be in the average industrial environment. Even beyond aviation and aerospace, PFPEs have served admirably whenever the higher initial cost was easily overcome by the far more important need to consistently meet and even exceed performance expectations.

Leadership for Reliability

Do You Fit the Bill? 8 Crucial Skills Maintenance Managers Must Have

As a maintenance reliability professional, you have technical training of some kind, basic knowledge of asset management principles, technical knowledge of the equipment you manage and practical experience from years working in the field. These are the hard skills needed to perform your job. However, technical education, training and knowledge will not give you the skills you need to effectively manage a team of maintenance professionals. Along with hard skills, you need a very particular set of soft skills to excel in your role. These skills will lead to greater productivity and efficiency across the maintenance team. More importantly, they will lead to less stress, greater job satisfaction and ongoing career achievement for you. These soft skills are:

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Practical Plant Analysis: Understanding Viscosity’s Effects on Centrifugal Pump Performance

The current low oil market environment has forced many producers to look into efficient and cost-effective ways to do business. Therefore, it becomes the responsibility of every engineer involved in the oil and gas sector, or any industry for that matter, to come up with innovative ways to analyze, understand and resolve problems plaguing their respective disciplines without incurring excessive costs.

Asset Condition Management

A Practical Guide to Emissivity in Infrared Inspections

Many of you are probably familiar with spot temperature guns, those infrared (IR) test tools where you point a laser beam at an object (e.g., motor, pump, fluorescent light ballast, air conditioning or heating duct, or your barbecued steak). Point, shoot and voila! You have a temperature on the LCD display.