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on Maintenance Reliability

A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:


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Why do Machines and Equipment Continue to Fail? 

Why do Machines and Equipment Continue to Fail? 

 This white paper will teach you how to solve your plant and equipment reliability problems and improve your current plant and equipment reliability up to magnificent performance. 

Since the mid-1980’s we have known exactly how to guarantee incredible equipment reliability. Failure-free machinery and equipment is totally achievable (in fact it is remarkably straightforward to do). We have all the answer—we know all the science; we know all the engineering; all the necessary information is readily available. The research has long been completed. The correct solutions for magnificent reliability are practical and quite doable. The problem that remains, is that though we know exactly what needs to be done to get magnificently reliable machines, we cannot get companies to do it right. The limitation to achieving magnificent reliability is not technical. The limitation now seems to be organisational, cultural, and human factors related.

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 How Management Decisions Make or Break Plant Uptime 

 How Management Decisions Make or Break Plant Uptime 

 When you run machines above design rates that decision goes against all that we know about creating high plant uptime and outstanding equipment reliability—in fatigue situations 10% additional stress will cost you ten breakdowns. 

The dominate factor in machine life and production plant uptime is the stress in your machines’ working parts. The stress developed in a part’s material of construction microstructure is directly linked to the force applied to it. It does not matter where the force comes from or why it is applied, once the stress in your parts go beyond their microstructure limits your machines fail. If you want to run at high production rates first ensure that your working parts cannot become overstressed.

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Opportunities for Maintenance and Operations: PM Route

Opportunities for Maintenance and Operations: PM Route

We are back with our 4th installment in the Opportunities for Maintenance and Operations series! We have discussed alarms, rework, and event rates. Today we talk about PM Routes. What can a PM Route do if our CMMS system has the ability to manage them? How does one take advantage? Watch the video and find out.

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Using a Weibull Distribution to model Production Output

Using a Weibull Distribution to model Production Output

In probability theory and statistics, the Weibull distribution is a continuous probability distribution. It models a broad range of random variables. Largely in the nature of a time to failure or time between events. It addresses mechanical or structural failures in the field of Reliability Engineering. By nature, the Weibull distribution provides a lot of information such as aging characteristics or expected asset lifetime. One of its most common outputs is the Bathtub Curve.

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Preventing Failure Using Physics of Failure Science

Preventing Failure Using Physics of Failure Science

Physics-of-Failure warns us to keep the sum of all static and cyclic loads on a part’s microstructure below its fatigue stress limit.

The image below shows two example metal fatigue limit failure curves. These curves were determined based on controlled laboratory experiments. These experiments use a machine with a fixed load to test the selected piece’s microstructure stress levels. Curve A shows that at a high stress level, close to the Ultimate Tensile Strength of steel, the test piece failed after 10,000 cycles. As the fatigue stress level is reduced, the test piece lasts longer. When the imposed stress is limited to around 50% of the UTS, the cycles to failure had no measurable limit. On the other hand, Curve B shows that at all levels of fatigue stress the component would eventually fail. However, the same outcome can be seen, that as stress reduces the service lifetime before failure increases.

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Why should I learn about RCM?

Why should I learn about RCM?

Have you ever tried to implement any asset improvement activity but it didn’t go so well?  Couldn’t rally the troops?  Couldn’t get the kind of management buy-in that you really needed to get things off the ground?  If so, you’re not alone.

I’ve read too many articles describing that up to 70% of asset improvement initiatives fail.  And I think it’s because a lot of people don’t have a basic understanding of maintenance and reliability principles.  So they don’t understand why “change” needs to take place.

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Defect Elimination needs to be Systematic to Stop Failures in Your Company

Defect Elimination needs to be Systematic to Stop Failures in Your Company

Focus on failure elimination, otherwise equipment failures never stop because they are forever being introduced and perpetuated by poor procedures and practices, poor quality control and poor business management systems.

Knowing defects cause future equipment failures, production downtime, unnecessary costs and lost profits, it is necessary to put defect elimination strategies into place to purposely stop defects occurring and to remove the defects that are already present.

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Transforming FMEAs into RAM Models

Transforming FMEAs into RAM Models

Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is an excellent foundation for Reliability Programs. It is also a stepping stone to build Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) models. Here lies the “beauty” of doing Reliability and Maintenance analysis. Whereby information from one analysis can help enhance another analysis.

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How Can Companies Stop Their Machines Failing?

How Can Companies Stop Their Machines Failing?

 Plant and equipment failures are business process failures. Plant stoppages and breakdowns result from failure-causing practices built into business processes and from leaving the right reliability practices out of them. Processes may superficially look okay because they have documentation, charts and records, but if you suffer a steady stream of failures, problems, and rework, then your processes contain unforeseen ‘traps’ into which your people and equipment regularly fall. Failure was not intended when your processes were chosen and designed, but failure is what happens when they are used.

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What Kinds of Assets can RCM be Applied to?

What Kinds of Assets can RCM be Applied to?

Air, sea, space, land, or underground? Commercial, government, or military? Reliability Centered Maintenance has something for everyone!

Absolutely.  In fact, in Stanley Nowlan and Howard Heap’s book on RCM, they state:

The content of scheduled-maintenance programs developed by experienced practitioners of MSG-2 techniques may be quite similar to the programs resulting from RCM analysis, but the RCM approach is more rigorous, and there should be much more confidence in its outcome.  The RCM technique can also be learned more quickly and is more readily applicable to complex equipment other than transport aircraft.

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Maintenance Tactics: A Practical Guide to Balancing Cost, Reliability, and Risk

Maintenance Tactics: A Practical Guide to Balancing Cost, Reliability, and Risk

In most industries we ideally want the lowest-cost maintenance strategy, one that balances risk of unplanned vs planned maintenance costs to a lifetime minimum.

This is what we’ve calculated in a previous article HERE, and this article/exercise is a follow-on from this.

The downside of using this method is that it may select a maintenance interval where the inherent reliability of the component at changeout time is less than is required for operational reasons, or that we’re not getting the best “increase in reliability vs marginal cost” value. [Read more…]

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Asset Management Fundamentals

Asset Management Fundamentals

First master the fundamentals

Basketball Olympic Gold Medallist Larry Bird

The industrial world today is abuzz with a lot of terminologies and jargons mainly stemming from today’s technological advances in the areas of sensors, data, communication and electronics. Each day brings in something new for the Asset Owners from the service providers who claim that their technology, product or service is ‘unique’ and has been ‘never seen before’. While a lot of these offerings are innovative in many aspects, the real question lies in how do they fit within the ‘fundamentals of the Asset Management’? [Read more…]