Uptime® Magazine
The mission of Uptime Magazine is to make maintenance reliability professionals and asset managers safer and more successful by providing case studies, tutorials, practical tips, news, book reviews, and interactive content.
Human factors play a vital role in influencing maintenance reliability management in an organization. This article presents some specifics on the influence of culture and leadership in the process and chemical industries.
Regional oil analysis initiative moves reliability information from spreadsheets to the Cloud. Around-the-clock operation of heavy equipment in harsh, gritty conditions is the nature of the coal mining and production business. Equipment failure is not an option for an industry that services customers around the world.
Research currently being carried out by the Center for Risk and Reliability, University of Maryland1, and funded by the U.S. Navy is aimed at quantifying reliability in scientific terms. The present study “relies on a science-based explanation of damage as the source of material failure and develops an alternative approach to reliability assessment based on the second law of thermodynamics.” Current reliability calculations are predisposed to a single failure mode or mechanism and assume a constant failure rate, while this research implies that reliability is a function of the level of damage a system can sustain, with the operational environment, operating conditions and operational envelope determining the rate of damage growth.
There is an overwhelming focus on sustainability these days. Issues related to carbon emissions, global warming, exponentially growing landfills, rampant energy wastages, etc., which seemed conceptual a decade or two ago, are a reality hitting everyone harder than ever before. Most people are yearning to play a role in contributing to the world’s sustainability goals, which is a very good step!
Seldom do railways have the resources to maintain their infrastructure at a level that ensures steady-state performance. Rather, they are faced with prioritizing maintenance actions to optimize safety and reliability under the burden of constrained resources. Given this reality, railway operations are finding the solution to work more efficiently lies in using information technology. By harnessing the vast amount of existing rail corridor data in a prioritized plan and then assigning the work and monitoring the execution and results with software, many railways are doing more with less resources. This strategy is called linear asset decision support (LADS) and it not only results in steady-state asset performance under constrained resources, it also can improve the asset condition and provide a positive return on investment.
Most machines have rotating parts and those rotating parts vibrate. Measuring how and how much those parts vibrate can tell you a lot about the health of a machine. Whether it’s the rumble of worn bearings or the shaking, shimmying, or thumping of loose, misaligned, or unbalanced parts, machines have a tale to tell those who are willing and able to listen.
Asset dependent organizations need to be continually educated and diligent about the importance of classifying assets in terms of the impact of asset failure on the organization. By using a prescriptive method to identify and classify failure consequences, organizations can most effectively allocate asset care resources within their enterprise asset management (EAM) model. Within the reliability-based maintenance (RBM) asset management model, this prescriptive means is a facilitated process called asset criticality ranking (ACR).
Featured Articles
