Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
Shaft alignment on pumps. Shaft misalignment is one of the most common reasons for bearing and mechanical seal failures. Rotating misaligned shafts produce vibration and complex fluctuating radial and axial loads that lead to breakdowns. Shaft alignment is a precision maintenance requirement that requires exacting care and detail and if not performed will cause much production down time.
Keywords: axial alignment, laser alignment, dial indicator, soft foot, shaft coupling. [Read more…]
I want my customers to be successful, every one of them. Yet there are times I can see the writing on the wall and I know as hard as I might try to show them a clear path to what it takes to be successful they have their own plan. Some of them are so complex that people become confused just trying to make sense of them, and others get so hung up in the minutiae of even the simplest of steps like listing a 3 part failure mode they will word-smith themselves to a point where folks just give up. I find myself asking “why do people have to make what is really so simple into something that appears to be complex?” [Read more…]
Knowing How Equipment Fails Allows Effective Plans to Be Put In Place and Improve Equipment Reliability
In the 1960s the failure rate of jet aircraft was high even with the extensive maintenance programs that were put in place to prevent the failures. The programs required overhauls, rebuilds and detailed inspections which required the various components to be disassembled. All of these activities were based on an estimated save life of the equipment. [Read more…]
Being proactive with your assets is all about managing failures before they occur. You can reduce or eliminate the consequences of failure by forecasting what is likely to happen and deciding in advance about what to do about it. The advantage to doing this is that major business impact due to equipment breakdown can be avoided. High performing companies manage proactively – they foresee and avoid problems. It’s good for business! [Read more…]
Fibreglass construction and repair. Fibreglass is a glass fibre reinforced plastic composite with excellent chemical resistance properties. Its physical properties, selection of resins and glass, method of construction and fabrication and peculiar repair requirements must be appreciated when using this material.
Keywords: laminate, backing layer, structural layer, corrosion barrier, crack repair, winding angle. [Read more…]
Something light to read on a Monday afternoon.
I’m beginning think that one of the worst side effects of growing older has nothing to do with the fact that you are not as active as you should be, but that you spend that time where you should have been walking, running, riding a bike or chasing the kids thinking about crap that might have little significance to the rest of the world. [Read more…]
Making the criticality analysis work for you and drive improvements in the maintenance strategy
Most manufacturers do not have an up to date criticality analysis and those that do have one, do not use it to drive decisions. Having a criticality analysis facilitates improved decision making and prioritization within the site and business.
How many times are there debates regarding which work needs to be done, which PMs will be dropped from the schedule because the planned downtime was reduced? These debates occur regularly, but to not have to occur. A criticality analysis drives improvements in the business by: [Read more…]
Your upfront capital investment must go beyond engineering, procurement and building costs. Additional activities that will need to be done that fit within the 2 – 3 % of capital cost figure are:
RCM analysis on the new design (preferably at both concept and detailed design phases so you can incorporate design change recommendations easily) [Read more…]
What readers will learn in this article.
Several weeks ago a customer I worked with back in 2005 called me to ask some questions about a specific Root Cause Analysis process they were using as well as the facilitator they were working with. While I was familiar with the RCA process they were using I admitted to them I had never attended the formal training program offered by the company and while I did know the facilitator I had never seen him facilitate a formal RCA.
My customer then asks me a more difficult question; “Would you recommend we use this methodology as our select supplier for Root Cause Analysis training?” [Read more…]
Understanding the risks allow effective mitigation plans to be put in place
Where is your biggest risk to the site? If you can’t answer that, than your maintenance program is most likely not adequate. As previously discussed, an effective maintenance program must align with business and its needs. A criticality analysis allows the site to understand where there are risks that must be managed. [Read more…]
RCM has two potential uses – to set you up for success or to regain success from the jaws of failure.
Regardless of when you use it though, RCM alone isn’t enough to get all the benefits. Applying it after the systems are in service, to recover shortfalls in performance, and then failing to follow up on RCM’s results only delivers part of the benefit. That’s where the aircraft and nuclear industries and the military have it right – they take those extra needed steps. The rest of us don’t! [Read more…]
Preventative maintenance stops breakdowns. Preventative Maintenance requires people to regularly walk around looking, feeling, listening, smelling (sometimes even tasting) and thinking about their equipment’s operating condition. The three foundations of classical Preventative Maintenance are regular lubrication checks, drive train monitoring and equipment mounting inspections.
Keywords: work order, inspection, watchkeeping, CMMS, computerised maintenance management system. [Read more…]
Several weeks ago, I wrote an article titled the 10 Worst Things About Business Travel. Anyone who has traveled extensively for business will tell you that life on the road can become both mundane and exhausting. Run into me on my third week of travel in an airport, and I’m likely to be a touch grumpy. I’m ready to go home, spend time with my family and sleep in my bed.
After reading the article, a friend of mine asked me why I continue to travel for a living, “You could get a job at 50 different companies in Rochester, if the travel is so bad, why not stop?” [Read more…]
Except for a few industries where mistakes can have high costs in terms of human life or massive environmental impact most of us do a poor job of setting ourselves up for success. We build or acquire new capital assets making little or no provision for spare parts, training of maintainers and operators in new skills and knowledge. Most of us do a very poor job of providing technical documentation to the support disciplines – project engineering often simply files whatever it has gathered and often in a file scheme tied to contractor contract numbers rather than using the asset hierarchy that everyone else will use in one form or another. Commissioning activities rarely push the new assets hard enough – they ramp up slowly, almost gingerly, because so few really know much about how it all should work. They are unprepared for any semblance of normal operations. [Read more…]
