What are the most innovative approaches to preventive maintenance?

Innovative Approaches to Preventive Maintenance 1. Predictive Analytics: Use data-driven insights and sensors to predict equipment failures, allowing timely maintenance before breakdowns occur. 2. IoT Integration: Connect devices for real-time monitoring, enabling remote diagnosis. 3. Condition-Based Maintenance: Monitor equipment health through sensors to schedule maintenance based on actual condition, not just fixed schedules. 4. AI-Powered Solutions: Employ artificial intelligence to analyze data patterns, suggesting optimal maintenance intervals and strategies. These innovative methods revolutionize maintenance by shifting from reactive to proactive strategies, reducing downtime, and optimizing equipment performance.

One of the things that should be valued is the vibration analysis of bearings, high speed and low speed critical plant units that if they failed would cause serious damage. The monitors can be fed back on to a software system that daily plant inspectors can check over and highlight any potential issues, go out and inspect units with hand held unit. If you are a 24/7 then feed that back to the control room to allow them to highlight problems or make changes to system parameters. External changes may be able to be made to help with reducing vibrations or specifics that you may need to “nurse through” until a suitable time with parts and Labour to replace it in reduced time line that running to failure.

Condition-based maintenance, enabled through continuous remote condition monitoring, can offer some advantages over traditional periodic maintenance strategies. Reduced MRO costs and more efficient use of maintenance engineer resource are some benefits – as instead of replacing parts at fixed intervals, parts are only replaced when necessary, leading to significant cost savings. Key to implementing an effective condition-based maintenance strategy is, firstly, identifying the critical assets on your line to connect and monitor. And secondly, identifying the key parameters to monitor, which are effective leading indicators of failure. For example, on a conveyor drive motor, the best parameters to monitor might be speed and torque.

One critical parameter is environmental monitoring and to check the efficiency of bag filters or precipitators, CEM are usually fed back to CCR for monitoring for legal compliance. Commissioning software of the CEM gives instant feedback back of signals that is often damped down back to the CCR system to minimise excessive bandwidth, the software used to calibrate and to access the instrument out on site can be valuable for detecting any filter or precipitation problems. Often being able to pin point filter problems to a set bank or row of potential issues, making planned maintenance easier and also allowing to predict longer term maintenance goals or extending baghouse lifetime.

Don’t accept that a plant has always had bearings replaced at **|**|**, Can you extend it by changing the type of lubricants used? How can you monitor its effectiveness and what you aim to achieve. Can you change purge cleaning cycles to increase bag life? The target is always to run the plant at your reliability KPI strategy, that’s what will control all investments and plans to get to where you need to get.

In my opinion, Autonomous Maintenance has three main objectives: 1. This equipment pays your salary! Sense of ownership of the asset operator. By having to carry out regular inspections and having to report any defect identified according to an agreed checklist you feel the asset is yours and you will take care of it. 2. Learning by doing. By having to review key components of your asset, you learn what they are used for and the importance they have for enabling required performance, availability, quality and safety to related process. 3. Detect a minor defect before a much more serious failure takes place. Finally, we should provide "Fix it yourself" tools and appropriate systems to prioritize&manage maintenance requests such as CMMS.

I am all for autonomous maintenance, however it relies on good communication systems and operators talking to line managers of what they have done and what they do regularly. Getting a key list of what EVERY plant operators do and document it in to what you want all your operators to do is key. Making sure it’s a working document and can be changed as required. Be careful of leaving it to the operators as one operator will check things that others don’t. Make sure that you get them all doing the same things and any issues with reliability can be added as a check / clean as required.

Maintenance periods. Usually you have to work in multiples of maintenance periods, if you plan an annual maintenance then you have to look at aiming to get two years, it’s a big step and you have to have confidence in what you choose as a plant team. You may want to look at putting something in that costs more money, but overall you are saving in labour costs and management of the tasks being done at set maintenance periods. Putting cheaper products in as it’s pointless getting something to last 18 months when you replace every year. Most important is to review each outage to make sure you are being cost effective and maintain reliability.