The digital transformation has changed the way that businesses are able to get the best assessment of their overall procedures. Rather than waiting for hitches and breakdowns, technological advancement is sounding the alarm on issues in real-time. One of the ways this is being accomplished is through what’s known as predictive maintenance. Let’s take a closer look at how a predictive maintenance program is optimizing organizations in a variety of industries.
Predictive Maintenance
You may have found yourself searching “what is predictive maintenance?” Predictive maintenance, also known as condition-based maintenance, involves performance monitoring and equipment condition monitoring during regular operations to reduce the chance of equipment breakdown. This technology has been an asset for manufacturers within certain parameters. Prediction maintenance cannot exist without condition monitoring, with machines continuing to look into real working conditions for asset optimization.
For any maintenance strategy, predictive maintenance aims to reduce breakdown occurrence on the assembly line. This allows for a supply chain to maximize asset uptime by improving asset reliability. This in turn allows companies to optimize their operational costs by lowering maintenance work. This improves maintenance budgets by reducing maintenance expenses and maximizing production time with a properly structured maintenance schedule.
Maintenance Technologies
There are numerous condition-monitoring devices and techniques that manufacturers use to effectively predict issues and raise alarms when maintenance is required. For example, infrared thermography is widely used by relying on infrared cameras to spot above normal temperatures in equipment. Components that are worn out or are malfunctioning tend to heat up and are spotted through a thermal image. A preventive maintenance program may also utilize acoustic monitoring, detecting sounds, or vacuum leaks in equipment on an ultrasonic level. This supplements regular listening to better detect issues within a gearbox.
Vibration analysis in preventive maintenance allows technicians to use real-time sensors to monitor equipment. When a machine is at its peak, it emits a specific vibrational rhythm. The vibration changes and a new pattern emerges when there’s an issue. Vibration analysis detects misalignment and unbalanced elements. There’s also oil analysis, an effective tool in predictive maintenance to establish the presence of contaminants. Oil analysis determines viscosity, water, and particle counts. The main benefit of oil analysis is that its initial test results serve as a baseline for any new machinery and maintenance.
Predictive maintenance does employ other techniques like motor condition analysis to outline the functioning condition of motors. There’s also an eddy current analysis to spot changes in tube wall thickness. Manufacturers can also rely on computerized maintenance management systems and data integration to get a better assessment of mechanical equipment and labor costs. It’s all about having a proper corrective maintenance plan in place.
How This All Works
Starting a predictive maintenance program starts with analyzing the history of the equipment, reviewing all records about downtime, machine condition, and equipment faults. This will provide an understanding of the current status of systems, raising red flags about potential problems in production processes right away. From there, business owners can choose the equipment that they wish to include in the implementation of this preventive maintenance program. Keep in mind, the ultimate goal is for all equipment to be under this maintenance program.
Depending on the various conditions and overall assessment, detailed records should be created for individual systems and their components. From there, analysts can evaluate any pre-existing predictive maintenance protocols to understand prior methods to schedule maintenance or deal with the need for significant improvements. By establishing this frequency, a business can define personnel roles and resources needs to deal with a potential problem. From there, you can organize the program that best suits your needs for operational efficiency and preventing equipment downtime.