There are 3 types of Maintenance. Corrective, Preventive and Predictive Maintenance. All differ considerably, and are used in different situations. Corrective Maintenance involves doing nothing until something fails. For example, you purchase a new car and drive it until something breaks. It’s common sense that doing some minor maintenance at scheduled intervals is going to increase the lifespan of your vehicle, which is why we have services on our cars.
Preventive Maintenance is exactly this; pre determined schedules of maintenance that happen regardless of the equipments condition. Going back to the vehicle example, Preventive Maintenance includes regular inspections of fluids, safety checks and draining the necessary oils and filling them back up with new oil. By doing this, problems are identified before they worsen, and the fixes are minor. This usually translates to less costs, and the vehicle life is significantly extended. In the industrial world, everything from pumps through to conveyors, mills and crushers have preventive maintenance scheduled. This ensures that problems are picked up early and maintenance can be arranged to replace any worn parts before failure occurs.
Rock Crusher
Preventive maintenance isn’t cheap, but over the lifetime of equipment it certainly pays off. In most applications, downtime is extremely expensive. By having the right preventive maintenance schedule in place downtime is limited, and therefore the cost of doing the maintenance in the first place is negligible. Maintenance has changed and evolved significantly over the last 10 years. Today, the most preferred way to do maintenance is predictive. Of course, some machines aren’t easy to do this on and I will explain this below.
Like the name suggests, predictive maintenance involves predicting when a machine is going to fail. Now, I don’t mean that you pull a wand out and take a random guess – there are many different ways in which a machines condition can be monitored. These are known as condition monitoring, and include vibration analysis, oil analysis, thermal imaging and ultrasonic measurements. All of these are non destructive, fast and highly effective.
A lot of equipment in the industrial world has maintenance applied to it when it doesn’t need it. For example, pumps may be stripped down as part of a preventive maintenance schedule. If you were to find that the pump was in pristine condition, the maintenance was almost a waste of time. What if you could tell that the pump is in perfect condition without pulling it apart? By using vibration analysis, you can trend the vibrations and this will tell you the condition of the equipment. As rotational equipment wears it vibrates more, and this is easily identified. You can trend the vibration and watch it get worse, and plan maintenance when the equipment really needs it.
Each of the condition monitoring types mentioned above are specialised fields in themselves. If you want to improve the way your maintenance is done, I give you 2 pieces of advice. The first is to ensure you have a quality CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) and the second is to ensure that you are striving to implement predictive maintenance policies. These 2 suggestions will help point your maintenance in the right direction and ensure increased efficiency, moral and enjoyment in the maintenance departments.
Preventive Vs Predictive Maintenance
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