International Maintenance Technologies

Contracted Predictive Maintenance Program

It is not new to realize that the erection of industrial plants is not enough to guarantee its efficient survival. More important is the maintenance and optimization. In the old day's machinery, as backbone of industrial plants, were operated until costly failure occurs. This maintenance approach is known as the corrective maintenance approach, that long time was realized as a very costly approach. In a development step, maintenance engineers followed a planned maintenance action that adopts regular change of certain machinery components in an approach known as preventive maintenance.

Although the preventive maintenance approach has advantages over the correction  " Run - to - Fail " approach, it has its own shortcomings. Among these shortcomings, is replacing parts that are working properly and having a chance of introducing new troubles during the disassembly and assembly processes. Due to the increasing need to operate plants more efficiently an approach known as "predictive" maintenance approach is realized as a must for today's industry. This approach depends on evaluating the machine condition and its parameters. These parameters include in some machines, temperature of working media, temperature of machine casing and bearings, vibration and noise.

      One important parameter that happened to reflect the health of the machine and can indicate the type of problem is the vibration of the machine, if properly measured and interpreted. More developments in the predictive maintenance approach have emerged e.g. proactive maintenance approach.

IMT offers a contracted predictive maintenance program that include:

          -  Regular vibration measurement and analysis.

          -  Computerized data collection and development of maintenance data basses.

          -  Scheduling of shutdowns and prioritizing problems to be fixed.

          -  Eventually, asset management program and optimization of resources are provided.

 The type of contract, periodicity and nature of IMT involvement with the industry depend on the nature of industry, willingness of the management to invest in this direction. Eventually, the objective is to reach with the industry to a predictive maintenance program that is completely owned and operated by the plant or the factory after some time. In addition to help preparing the hardware and tools, IMT is interested to transfer the maintenance technology experience to the local industries, such that they will be following an established maintenance system.