The RELIABILITY Conference - 50:51 
by Wekianos Hailu, Clark County Water Reclamation District

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) as a maintenance philosophy has evolved in response to the needs of the speedy growth and diversification of technology and the demands dictated by organizational management and overall economic expectations. Traditional “fix it when it broke” mentality has been shown to be ineffective as a primary mode of maintenance and it is giving way to Condition Based Maintenance (CBM).

CBM is incorporated in the much wider concept of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). RCM, as a maintenance philosophy, is an integrated process in which factors including design, operation and maintenance aspects of an asset are evaluated towards optimum output and/ or maximum economic gain.

As a result multitude of organizations have embarked on CBM and RCM II and a lot more are on their way to implementing the philosophy. Implementation of CBM and transition to RCM, in general, require careful planning, training of necessary personnel and acquisition of condition monitoring tools together with the blessing of upper management.

The presentation will cover important aspects of RCM II such as, Failure, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, the Consequences of Failure. As an indication of how simple it is to start the implementation of CBM, experience at Clark County Water reclamation District, more specifically, a case of an 800 HP electric motor will be presented. The experience will be used to introduce and explain RCM principles indicated above, and other important tools such as Root Cause Analysis.

The parts that comprise the Uptime Elements will be introduced with emphasis on Asset Condition Monitoring tools and elements that relate to the case of the 800 HP.

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