Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
There are two instances when you should implement preventative action. First, once a failure occurs and you would like to avoid similar future failures. Second, before a failure occurs, yet an undesired failure mechanism is likely to occur.
Like corrective action there is a wide range of possible preventative actions. The selection of the right actions requires considering customer expectations, business and legal factors, along with the technical and economic feasibility. [Read more…]
Preventive Maintenance or PM is a set of inspections and tasks that help prevent equipment from failing. Keeping equipment operating improves plant capacity and throughput. Avoiding unwanted downtime helps the plant avoid unnecessary expenses and lost productivity.
Checking the oil level in your car’s engine and adding more as needed, along with regular oil changes are examples of PMs. [Read more…]
One of the considerations when planning maintenance is the timing of the replacement of parts of the system. In some cases it makes sense to wait for the item to fail, sometimes, it makes sense to place it on an interval or set an amount of operating time, and yet in others, we can measure indicators that a replacement is necessary.
In order to make these decisions, we need data.
According to O’Connor and Kleyner (Practical Reliability Engineering, 5th Ed.), we need specific information for each part. The following list outlines the recommended information. [Read more…]
Just a couple of sample questions from deep in the body of knowledge this week.
Which of the following can be evaluated with dye penetrant methods? [Read more…]