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Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Shotgun repair is trying to fix a system problem by replacing parts until the problem goes away. It is often done without regard to parts’ age-specific reliability information. Should you test before replacement? Which test(s) should you do? In which order? How long? Which part should you replace next if the test gave no indication of what’s wrong? What if test indication is imperfect or the fault is intermittent? What if there are more than one part failure?
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How I applied all seven steps of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) on my drive home from the Reliable Plant Conference
I just can’t seem to get away from Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).
(And that’s okay with me. After all, my (technical) heart and soul belong to RCM!)
I was driving home from Indianapolis, Indiana after speaking at the Reliable PlantConference ~ 399 miles.
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“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”
Martin Luther King
One of the challenges for any team leader is bringing the team together and agreeing on decisions and actions going forward.
Consensus building is the best practice for all of the FMEA team decisions. This means the FMEA team takes the time to understand all sides of an issue and finds a solution or determines a course of action that is supported by all team members. Facilitating is a consensual activity.
It has been awhile since Ike…so I figured this would be an appropriate time to post on hurricane risks.
During a hurricane plant equipment can be damaged both by high winds and flooding. For example, the majority of plant equipment damage caused by Hurricane Rita (2005) was wind related, whereas more flood-related damage was reported during Hurricane Ike (2008).
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Stainless steel is known for its corrosion resistance in many environments, with different alloys having different levels of corrosion resistance. Also, stainless steels are available with a wide range of strengths. Understanding the reasons for the corrosion resistance is helpful for selecting alloys based on the required strength and environment to which the steel will be exposed.
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As we all have learned, eliminating defects is the key to a safe and profitable plant. But how do we know where our ‘bugs” are hiding? There are certainly many ways to uncover where the bugs are, but one place in particular is your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or enterprise asset management system (EAM), as it is commonly referred.
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PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE STRATEGY IN A PLANT WELLNESS WAY EAM SYSTEM-OF-RELIABILITY
IN A PWW EAM SYSTEM-OF-RELIABILITY, PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE STRATEGY IS TO REPLACE PARTS WHEN EXCESSIVE STRESS BUILD-UPS IN THEIR MICRO-STRUCTURE
Organisations use different management systems to provide the required foundation to direct and control their activities to achieve their objectives.
When the organisational structure is complex, the organisation needs to develop a robust, practical, yet simplified, integrated management system. This strategy-focused integrated management system will fully integrate all relevant management practices and common touchpoints of the business into one coherent and synchronised management system. In doing so, it enables and drives the achievement of its corporate strategy and improve or drives performance.
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With all the buzz these days about design thinking, some of you may be wondering what it’s all about. How does it relate to design? And what can non-designers gain from it?
Design thinking is far more than simply designing products and services—it’s an approach to problem-solving that can be applied to an incredibly wide range of applications.
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BLEVE stands for Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion
If a tank containing liquid is subjected to external fire, the heat from the fire lead to boiling of the liquid. This in turn leads to increased pressure in the tank. This “boiling” liquid and “expanding” vapor may increase the pressure significantly and cause the tank to rupture. If the released liquid is flammable , it can catch on fire resulting in a fire and explosion.
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Fatigue cracks that originate at inclusions. Stainless steel intergranular corrosion due to chromium carbide precipitates. Low steel toughness because martensite not tempered enough. Low aluminum strength because of excessive grain boundary precipitation. Orange peel due to large grains.
These are examples of how problems with a metal’s microstructure lead to reliability and performance problems. Of course, there are thousands of examples of microstructures that lead to good reliability and good performance.
One hurdle to understanding metallurgy is being able to think small – very small. Less than a millimeter. Less than a micron. And sometimes on the scale of atoms.
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Paul Gladieux has over 45 years of experience working in the quality profession. In 1991, he founded Global Quality Management Advisors (GQM Advisors). The group provides quality-related services focused on management system design, development, compliance, and certification in a wide range of sectors. His clients in the energy sector include companies such as: NuScale Power LLC, BWX Technologies, Westinghouse Nuclear AP1000 Program, Terra Power LLC, Worley Energy | Chemicals, U.S. Department of Energy, Westinghouse Nuclear, Vigor Industrials LLC, and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company.
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Welcome to Day 2 of the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance 3-Day Training Course. I hope that you enjoyed Day 1 and found the maintenance and reliability concepts it contained useful.
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I know. I’m a lady. But it’s not my expression. That’s what my mentor, John Moubray, called it.
And he didn’t apologize for it when he used exactly that term during a one-on-one mentoring session with me.
And to this day, it’s one of the most valuable (and profitable) lessons he ever taught me.
In fact, it helped me win $1,428 in a poker tournament.
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Which of these six failure rate functions do your products and their service parts have? You don’t know? You don’t have field reliability lifetime data by product name or part serial number? That’s OK. Lifetime data are not required to estimate and classify failure-rate functions, including attrition and retirement. GAAP requires statistically sufficient field reliability data to classify failure rate functions for RCM.
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