on Maintenance Reliability

I have often heard employees complain they have no data to initiate a proper Reliability Improvement Program. This is not always true. And to no fault of theirs. They just don’t know how to use what they already have in terms of records. If you are running an operation, you should at least have production records – i.e. how much you are producing on a daily basis. If you don’t have this, then maybe you should not be in business at all. This article looks at ways to initiate a Reliability Program using the Barringer Process Reliability (BPR) methodology. The greatest advantage of this methodology is that it only requires productions records as an input.  That is how many units of production the plant produces on a daily basis.  For example, the barrels of crude oil processed per day in a refinery. Or the hectoliters of beer brewed in a brewery daily.

Failure Patterns according to Moubray

In his book Reliability Centered Maintenance¹, John Moubray highlights 6 patterns of failure. However, one needs to be careful about how those patterns are interpreted and used. Or misused. These 6 failure patterns are as follows:

• A: Bathtub Pattern
• B: Age Related or Wear Out Pattern
• C: Fatigue Pattern
• D: Initial Break-in Pattern
• E: Random Pattern
• F: Infant Mortality Pattern

Definition of a PF Curve

A PF curve is a graphical tool used in the field of maintenance and reliability. It essentially illustrates a component’s health degradation over its lifetime. As well as a visual guide on when to conduct appropriate action to minimizes operational risks related to unplanned failures. It is essentially a planning tool.