-14-October-2005

Preventing equipment failure before it happens

To be able to identify and diagnose equipment problems before they have a chance to manifest into unexpected downtime or catastrophic failure is a desire of many maintenance engineers, as finding the trouble quickly not only saves costly damage to the system, but also dramatically reduces operational costs. Predictive monitoring technologies that flag up problems are not new, but Eugene Sabini, Director of Technology, ITT Industrial Products Group, believes that they have now come of age and are ready to be universally accepted.

Forecasting the weather? It was not possible with any accuracy until we stationed satellites high above the earth to benchmark inputs (system location/ movement, winds, pressure differentials, etc) and analyze data received from visual sensors. But even with the highest level of technology offered today, we are at the mercy of climate changes which can catch us by surprise. The results can be more than just a bad forecast; they can actually result in violent storms with catastrophic consequences. Now, let us examine something closer to our own forecasting responsibilities.

Predicting failure

In industrial maintenance, we rely on our human senses: visual inspection, hearing, touch, and smell. Reactions to sense stimuli might include: that pump seal is leaking, that pump is awfully loud, that pump motor is too hot to touch, I smell something burning. The technician or operator would alert maintenance or operations management who would then turn-off the affected machine (and the process), inspect it and do repairs. If the equipment had experienced a catastrophic failure it could result in an extensive repair or even replacement, while the possible cause may have been something as simple as a bad bearing. Vibration and temperature sensors in a predictive condition monitoring system could have been picked-up the bearing problem weeks earlier, avoiding a system shutdown; and the repair could have been scheduled to minimize downtime and lost production.

Plant optimization has made predictive monitoring essential to bottom line results. Personnel walk-arounds are costly in terms of wasted man-hours, system downtime, lost production and maintenance expense. So why hasn’t industry responded by implementing predictive monitoring (PM) on all rotating equipment? The main barriers are cost and difficulty in understanding the technology.

According to Plant Services magazine, “organizations are reluctant to invest in new manufacturing technologies because they are not convinced of the return on investment (ROI). In a survey of 500 companies, fewer than 3% of respondents were able to achieve a measurable return on their investment using existing, high end PM technologies.

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