Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
What you will learn from this article.
Imagine working within (or maybe you don’t need to imagine it) an organization in which everything is completely reactive. You arrive early to try and organize the work for the day, yet only to find out someone else is there doing it. [Read more…]
What you will learn from this article.
Ask 10 people to tell you what Precision Maintenance means. While some will use a few of the same words or give a few similar examples of what they think Precision Maintenance is you are going to get 10 different answers.
While few would argue the importance of Precision Maintenance, I find it interesting that in the world that offers Certifications in Asset Management and Equipment Reliability (CRE, CRL, CMRP) you won’t find an agreed-on definition of what Precision Maintenance means. [Read more…]
Regardless of how good a maintenance & reliability program is set up and managed, there will be failures. This is partly due to the maintenance program itself, where the focus is on the consequences of the failures, not the failures itself. This approach allows most organizations to manage large facilities will a minimum of staff and cost.
But what should happen when something does fail? Should we just carry on as usual since we avoided the consequences? Absolutely not. When a failure occurs, we need to learn from it and improve the maintenance & reliability program. Yet, many organizations address failures by implementing a PM routine. This is not the right approach. Remember only 11% of failures are age-related. Adding these PM routines to the program will cause a collapse of the program from too much work, not to mention the maintenance induced failures that result from it.
So what should happen? The failure should be analyzed and actions implemented to reduce the chance of the failure occurring again.
[Read more…]
Clean, dry oil can extend equipment life between failure up to 8 – 10 times the normal operating life. Timken, the bearing manufacturer, reports that reducing water levels from 100 ppm (parts per million) to 25 ppm increases bearing life 2 times. British hydraulics research indicates that if solids contamination with particles larger than 5 microns (0.005 mm or 0.0002”) is reduced from the range of 5,000 – 10,000 particles per milliliter of oil to 160 – 320 particles, the machine life is increased 5 times. [Read more…]
One of the curses of Reliability Centered Maintenance and Root Cause Analysis is a great Facilitator makes the process look easy. So easy in fact that after watching a good facilitator lead one event we’d like to believe we could jump right up and facilitate the next one with no training or assistance. In Mentoring RCM Blitz™ facilitators during the certification process we work to perfect 2 dozen skills with the hope of turning out great facilitators. The skill we typically spend the most time working on is writing failure modes.
A failure has just occurred on a critical asset in your facility. The result was 2 hours of lost production, but it could have been worse. The last time that the equipment failure occurred it took 5 hours to repair. Why was the failure repaired in less than half the time than the previous occurrence? How can we ensure that we learn from this failure and the team’s performance to improve the plant performance?
I remember reading about a simple philosophy quite a few years ago (although I can’t remember who stated it, so I apologize that I cannot provide a reference), about a simple analysis that can be applied to any maintenance activity to improve performance. This analysis is call the 2 Up / 2 Down analysis.
The 2 Up / 2 Down analysis is quite simple and involves asking two questions.
[Read more…]
Abrasion is the removal of material from a surface by the movement of material across its surface. The factors affecting abrasive wear are the surface properties of the item being worn away, the abrasive properties of the material moving across the surface and the characteristics of motion. [Read more…]
I’m using this week to get my office in order. This morning I found this series of drawings I did back around 1987. While I know my old friends from Building 317 will get a kick out of this, I also know that we weren’t the first and won’t be the last team of people who worked to make our plant a better place to work. I also know the last slide from this series is missing that showed the team alone saying “If you want to know how it happened, it pays to give credit where credit is due.” [Read more…]
Many organizations try to improve performance by just creating PM routines and letting the technicians loose to perform the work. This often has negative effects on plant performance. This has been proven through studies conducted by Ledet at numerous DuPont sites. This study looked at the impact of Planning, Scheduling and Preventative Maintenance on Plant Performance.
Ledet had found that by just implementing a PM / PdM program, organizations lost 2.40% of uptime (on a baseline of 83.50%). Not quite the results to expect when implementing a strategy to improve plant performance. When the PM / PdM program is implemented with Planning & Scheduling, the plant saw an increase of 5.10%. Now that is an improvement.
But what about the remaining 11.40% of uptime? How does one address the remaining downtime?
[Read more…]
With 2016 having come to an end, I thought it would be fun to start 2017 with some laughs about when your company realized it was time to focus on reliability. I have a 3-person team who will vote for the best submission on Friday the winner will receive a signed copy of my book Reliability Centered Maintenance Using RCM Blitz™ [this is a reposting of Doug’s article and let’s see if he has another book to give away.) [Read more…]
A U-tube manometer is the simplest of the pressure measurement devices. Its name comes from the U-shape formed when the two ends of a flexible tube full of liquid are raised to keep the liquid from coming out the ends. A U-tube manometer is a ‘liquid’ balance.
A spring balance used in the kitchen weighs a load by matching the force produced by the weight of the load with the force produced from the tension of the balance spring. The change in length of the spring is a measure of the load’s weight and is shown on a graduated scale by a pointer attached to the spring. Similarly, a U- tube manometer is used to balance the weight of the liquid in one leg of the ‘U’ against the pressure introduced into the other leg. The difference in height between the two legs of liquid represents the pressure pushing the liquid down one leg and up the other. The height difference is measured on a graduated scale. [Read more…]
A gear pump uses two meshing, toothed cogs to force water from the inlet of the pump through to the outlet. Figure No. 1 shows a simplified drawing of an external teeth gear pump on the left along with the alternate arrangement of internally pointing teeth. [Read more…]
As I work with teams of operators and skilled trades people performing RCM analyses at companies around the world at some point in time as we are discussing the failure modes and effects I might ask the question; how does your company ensure that the skilled trades people working on your assets are actually qualified to work on the equipment?
This question is often met with a look of confusion. [Read more…]