The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSDGC), Ohio, serves 800,000 customers and has approximately 600 employees who work at facilities located throughout Hamilton County, Ohio. The MSD Wastewater Treatment Division operates and maintains seven major treatment plants and more than 100 smaller treatment facilities that process an average of 180 million gallons of raw sewage per day. Most of the major treatment facilities were built in the 1950s and contain over 16,000 total discrete assets that are critical to meeting MSD’s mission of protecting public health and the environment through water reclamation and watershed management.
The development of PAS55, a British standard for supporting asset management, has had a very positive influence on various maintenance organizations. It’s a good document, one which has been slowly evolving into ISO55000, scheduled for issue in early 2014. According to Terrence O’Hanlon, CEO of Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime magazine, and a member of the ISO standards committee for asset management, ISO55000 is a management systems standard for asset management.
Uptime Magazine recently caught up with Martin Tauber and George Williams. These conversations provided some interesting insights that Uptime readers will find valuable.
Uptime Magazine congratulates the following outstanding programs for their commitment to and execution of high-quality Predictive Maintenance and Condition Monitoring Programs.
Dragan Trivanovic with Zellstoff Celgar Limited Partnership accepts the Uptime Award for Best Operator Driven Reliability Program
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The production unit was down, again. This time a pump had failed. Jim, a maintenance manager for a chemical plant just outside Baton Rouge, La., felt as if his days were spent running from one emergency to the next. Work requests were piling up and his people were barely keeping up. He was concerned about what they were missing. Their plant maintenance work plans were very limited and constantly overdue. He knew they needed to get out of the reactive state they were in, but getting a grip on and gaining visibility to the workload was a constant struggle.
This is Part 2 of a five-part, series. Part 1 (Uptime Oct/Nov 2013) dealt with the mechanical aspects of using accelerometers, while Part 2 will cover the electronic aspects of dealing with those small signals. Part 3 will discuss calibrating accelerometers to determine their sensitivity. In Parts 4 and 5, we will attach accelerometers to various machines so they can report on machinery health.
Since the discovery of modern asset reliability principles, first detailed by F. Stanley Nowlan and Howard F. Heap in the mid-1960s, up until the latest evolution in the 1990s by John Moubray, some 30 odd years have passed, but with little rigorous adoption of these principles into the asset management strategies of North American industry. This article is intended to help explain why the adoption of these truths has been so hard to come by over these past 30 years and what it will take for the adoption of these reliability principles to occur.
Selecting from among the many equipment or component manufacturers requires forethought. Experience shows that picking the right bidders is an important prerequisite for choosing the best machine, or selecting critically important components, such as bearings and fluid sealing devices. Let’s take a look at several examples to support this contention.
Weibull analysis is an important statistical tool in the realm of reliability engineering. It helps in the modeling of increasing, decreasing and constant failure rates.
In 2010, it was reported that as many as 43 percent of U.S. manufacturers were deploying some form of business improvement strategy centered around lean manufacturing principles, Six Sigma, or the original Toyota production system (TPS).
The ability to look at the audio signal adds a wealth of information about the original ultrasonic signal and can be summarized as “pictures” versus “numbers.” The waveform reveals the instantaneous value of the signal. The wave shape reveals signal strength, transient impacts, frequency of cyclic phenomena, beats and harmonic content.