Precautionary maintenance

State of the Art

Javier Snchez Quiros and Gerald Frank Mercieca 09/11/2012

Precautionary maintenance

Design Methods

1 Index

1 2 3 4 5

Index ............................................................................................................................. 2 Figures and Tables ......................................................................................................... 2 Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 3 Introduction: an Overview of Maintenance ................................................................... 3 State of the Art on Maintenance ................................................................................... 4 5.1 5.2 5.3 Predictive .............................................................................................................. 4 Proactive ............................................................................................................... 6 Self-maintenance ................................................................................................... 8

6 7 8

Comparisons ............................................................................................................... 10 Conclusion................................................................................................................... 11 Reference .................................................................................................................... 12

2 Figures and Tables

Figure 1 - The development of maintenance technologies (Murthy, et al., 2007) ......................... 4

Figure 2 - Integrated system employing three categories of techniques for predictive maintenance of industrial sensors and equipment (Hashemian & Bean, 2011) ........................... 5

Figure 3 - Integrated system of proactive maintenance (Muller, Suhner et al., 2008) ................... 7

Figure 4 - Structure of self-maintenance systems (Wang, Zhou et al., 2010)................................. 9

Figure 5 - The process of developing self-maintenance (Wang, Zhou et al., 2010) ........................ 9

Figure 6 - Failure Curves (Hashemian & Bean, 2011) .................................................................. 10

Table 1 - Action / Policy maintenace types (personal compilation based on the document) ....... 11

Precautionary maintenance

Design Methods

3 Abstract
During the last decades maintenance has evolved from a simple part of production process to an essential strategic element within a business. Organizations try to survive in a more competitive environment, in this way processes and systems have became highly complex, consequently new approaches for maintenances has been carried out in order to fulfil this need. The essay will go through from a quick review of the more basic/ traditional maintenance to a wider explanation of the state of the art systems, the latest research on this field and its conclusion. Finally a comparison between the different types available will be carried out in order to justify the need to keep investigating within this area.

4 Introduction: an Overview of Maintenance

Taking into account the importance of maintenance on business it is assumed that the choice of the type of maintenance is based not on technical but techno-economic consideration. Depending on the condition of the system different policies are applied. A corrective maintenance (CM) is defined as the reparation or restoring that is done after a breakdown or failure, that is, the action on this policy is reactive. It is stated to be a good choice for systems with a constant failure rate and a low breakdown cost (Murthy, Kobbacy, & Dawsonera, 2007), in view of the fact that any other maintenance policy does not help to reduce the failure probability. However, other policies are applied to other systems, where a measurable condition is available to signal the probability of a failure and used to reduce it. It is also important to consider systems where the failure can lead to a dangerous situation or disaster (H. Wang, 2002), where in these cases a corrective maintenance is not a choice. As it is stated in the previous paragraph other kinds of maintenance are essential, these are all embraced with the name of precautionary maintenance (PM) (Murthy, et al., 2007), also named preventive maintenance (Patton Joseph, 1983) depending on the author. PM actions are fairly more complex than the former. These could be preventive, predictive, proactive or passive and have one goal common, that of reducing the failure probability and/or anticipating the consequences of a failure. Preventive maintenance is based on actions carried out in equipment at predetermined intervals of time, not considering its condition or equipment status at that time, in other way, the maintenance actions take place either in a certain age T or in failure whichever occurs first. According to Hashemian & Bean (2011) it is the most common maintenance policy, however this technique is inefficient and unreliable: In 2007, Emerson/Rosemount Company published data on the performance history of their pressure, level, and flow transmitters in various industries . The data showed that during periodic maintenance actions, technicians found transmitters to be experiencing no problems 70% of the time. By contrast, in nuclear power

Precautionary maintenance

Design Methods

plants, where online or predictive maintenance is used, this number is over 90% therefore more economical and reliable maintenance strategies are needed.

Figure 1 The development of maintenance technologies (Murthy, et al., 2007)

5 State of the Art on Maintenance

Even when Time-based maintenance try to prevent the breakdown of the system, other kind of maintenance are need to tackle the problem of inefficiency and unreliability. In this sense three new different approaches for maintenance will be described at this point.

5.1 Predictive
Predictive maintenance also called online-monitoring or condition-based maintenance uses the technology nowadays available, such as, sensor and systems to process the information, in order to measure a reliability indicator, and perform maintenance when this indicator reaches a predetermined level. It is a process that requires both technology and human skills, therefore it is the integration of data, processes, logs and analysis that indicate what kind of maintenance actions have to be done (Murthy, et al., 2007). One of the main uses of predictive maintenance is in industrial processes in order to monitoring the state of equipment to identify degradation or failure. Industrial plants must carry out calibration which involves observing for drift and identifying the transmitters that have drifted beyond acceptable limits. This approach reduces by 80%90% the effort currently expended on calibrating pressure transmitters. Different techniques are clustered in three main types depending on the way of use of sensors (Hashemian & Bean, 2011). Firstly, the existing sensor-based maintenance technique makes use of the existing sensors employed in the industrial process in order to find flaws in the received signals that indicate a erratic behavior, for instance, the output of a pressure sensor in an operating plant can be used not only to indicate the pressure, but also to verify the calibration and response time of

Precautionary maintenance

Design Methods

the sensor itself and to identify anomalies in the process. Secondly, the test-sensor-based maintenance technique, which uses data from external test sensors such as accelerometers and acoustic sensors in order to spot malfunctions due to mechanical failures or leaks. While the previous kinds of maintenance are passive, the test-signal-based maintenance technique depends on signals that are injected into the equipment, this category includes active measurements such as insulation resistance tests and inductance, capacitance, and resistance measurements, also known as LCR testing. These methods are used to detect defects such as cracks, corrosion, and wear for the predictive maintenance of cables, motors, sensors, and other equipment (Hashemian & Bean, 2011).

Figure 2 Integrated system employing three categories of techniques for predictive maintenance of industrial sensors and equipment (Hashemian & Bean, 2011)

The three technologies previously discussed are part of U.S. DOE projects under the Small Business Innovation Research program to sponsor R&D work at high-technology SME firms with the goal of converting the results into commercial products. The name of these projects respectively are: On-Line Monitoring of Accuracy and Reliability of Instrumentation, Wireless Sensors for Equipment Health and Condition Monitoring in Nuclear Power Plants and Wireless Sensors for Predictive Maintenance of Rotating Equipment in DOEs Research Reactors. As a result of these researches it can be conclude that industrial plants should deploy online maintenance strategy and no longer assume random equipment failure incurring in unnecessary costs as a consequence of time-based maintenance.

Precautionary maintenance

Design Methods

Case Study: Utilities / Pharmaceutical sector The Importance of quality on product within pharmaceutical sector has lead to be one of the most regulated industries. However the extra precautions necessaries to accomplish the strict regulation cause inefficiency. Therefore, in recent years regulatory modern maintenance has been supported by agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) in order to achieve a 24/7 model and reduce the downtime of equipment. The technologies used within the pharmaceutical industry related to Predictive maintenance (Liggan & Lyons, 2011) are: Thermography: It is based on the use of Infra-Red technology in order to identify high temperature of the equipment. When excessive heating of the equipment is detected, the equipment is repaired and rescanned to ensure that no damage is done. Vibration Analysis: Any machine has some level of vibration, consequently accelerometer instruments are used to detect abnormal vibration movements and therefore detect a mechanical fault. Theses signal are represented in frequency through the mathematical Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in order to detect variation in the vibrations. Motor rating, fan/pump drive end bearing type, driver pulley size, and gearbox ratio are some of the data required for the analysis program. Oil analysis: The oil used to lubricate the moving parts is analyzed and compared against original specification. This analysis can show deterioration of the oil or breaking down of an internal component. Ultrasonic measurement: It is used mainly for leak detection on steam and air systems, the high frequency analysis are translated into audible range so that users detect them and repair the leak.

The techniques previously enumerated are embraced under the category of test-sensorbased maintenance technique, that is, use of external sensors. Nevertheless, they are only some examples of the use of predictive maintenance and the benefits of implementing them.

5.2 Proactive
Proactive maintenance is in essence, a logical improvement over the traditional maintenance methods mentioned previously such as predictive and preventive. Basically, in proactive maintenance, it is important to keep track of previous errors made so as these mistakes would not be repeated in the future. Also, considering the long term situation, for example, one should not minimize funds in maintenance measures because it would probably end up even more expensive for the production of a product in the long term (Muller, Suhner, & Iung, 2008). Therefore proactive maintenance is more focused on the management of the maintenance methods used by monitoring and making sure that things are done properly in the first places so as to minimize time loss. This is done by taking care that machinery is properly installed, analysis of why certain machines failed are done, recurrence control, and engineering consistency. By applying these analyses, one can anticipate disturbances or

Precautionary maintenance

Design Methods

malfunctioning of a system. This would result in a robust system that is consistent (Chalifoux Alan, 1999; Marmier, 2009).

Figure 3 Integrated system of proactive maintenance (Muller, Suhner et al., 2008)

Case Study: Quay cranes Quay cranes are a good example where proactive maintenance was brought into practice. This is mainly because in this industry, it is not only time that is very valuable, but the parts to replace or repair the cranes are very expensive. Up till a couple of years ago, traditional maintenance methods were used such as corrective, scheduled and predictive but as the world became more industrialized and time even more valuable, the need for better machine efficiency was felt. Also, with the use of proactive maintenance, more life time could be obtained from the parts and therefore it would be cheaper because the parts would be changed just before failure and not at a random time when they would still be quite good (as the case in scheduled maintenance). This proactive maintenance helps identifying the best maintenance procedure as seen in the graph below.(Lung, Morel, & Leger, 2003)

Figure 4 - Decreasing of failure rate (and coast) by means of proactive maintenance (Lung, et al., 2003)

Precautionary maintenance

Design Methods

5.3 Self-maintenance
Self maintenance systems are inspired by nature, how the biological immune system works. The fact that the human body as a system can self maintain when it is having problems (illness) without the need of medicinal product has led to an interest in creating smart systems that can self maintain. Due to the ever increasing complexity of manufacturing systems and processes it is important to have a system that can predict failures and prevents such failures so as to save time, money and on the other hand, increasing safety and reliability. The traditional manufacturing industry works on a fail and fix system but with the help of these state of the art systems, the trend is shifting to a predict and prevent system thanks to modern technology such as smart algorithms (fuzzy logic, match matrix, etc) and other instruments (sensors, controllers, etc). This 4th generation of maintenance technology is aimed in zeroing downtime of a system, or better, the aim is not to avoid the failure of a system but to avoid the cost of breakdown, avoid the time loss. What self maintenance does as a system integrated in a machine is that it monitors itself regularly and when needed, repairs itself by using spare parts that had been already placed in the machine as a stock. A simple example of this could be a milling machine that changes its tool automatically when the older tool is worn out and hence is taking longer for the same function and giving a worse surface finish. In this way, there is a drastic decrease in down time of the machine and therefore the machine would work even more efficient. In general, self maintenance is a functional maintenance type. This means that it does maintenance by altering the original function with other functions the machine could do but still ending up with the same final product and allowing for the machine to keep working with what is functioning while at the same time fixing the fault. For this to take place, the machine must be smart, and therefore this means that a self-maintained machine needs to have an inbuilt reasoning system. This is different to traditional maintenance because in traditional, the machine is stopped and repairs or replacement of the faulty parts are done while the machine is down (Lee, Ghaffari, & Elmeligy, 2011). In general, a self maintenance machine should be able to get the data from the machine (ie observe how it is working with the use of high tec. sensors), then it should be clever enough to spot the faults in the system and classify them depending on what type of fault it is. By this, the machine would know the current life time left until a particular failure occurs and therefore it can start planning the repair so as to avoid downtime, and then, the execution of the repair procedure follows (Lee, et al.). Also, these machines need to be self-learning so that when faced with a problem that it had already encountered, it could improve on the method it had used to repair that fault and be even more efficient by taking a shorter time and obtaining a better final result (Labib, 2006).

Precautionary maintenance

Design Methods

A different way that self maintenance could be introduced in a machine is by having a machine that would monitor itself for any possible failures that could occur and then immediately gives a detailed report of what is required to be done or of what is going to fail or has already failed. In this way, there would still be the need of human interventions but the cost would be decreased because there would be less time needed to identify the problem due to it being addressed before it actually crops out (M.-H. Wang, Zhou, Chuan, & Zhao, 2010).

Figure 4 Structure of self-maintenance systems (Wang, Zhou et al., 2010)

As seen in the figure above, self maintenance systems is sub divided into three subsystems. This new technology of self maintenance could detect different kinds of failures, (not only mechanical faults as mentioned previously) but also health management, data processing, artificial intelligence and network technology (both wireless and non-wireless). The most important part in self maintenance is the detection system, this needs to be as fast as possible in gathering information about the entire system at real time so that the analysis system could evaluate the situation second by second (M.-H. Wang, et al., 2010). To do this, advanced integrated systems are used; these generally are a number of sensors together with complex algorithms.

Figure 5 The process of developing self-maintenance (Wang, Zhou et al., 2010)

In the figure above, the work flow of a self maintenance system is illustrated. A system is reliable if each of its sub systems are reliable, and therefore it is of vital importance that the systems that make up self maintenance are consistent.

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Design Methods

Case Study: Self-Maintained Robotic Systems Due to self-maintenance being such a new technology, a concept of self-maintenance is being presented. In this case, a proposal of self maintained robotic system is done. Current robotic systems work good as long as when there is a fault in the system, human power is used to repair/maintain the system, but creating self maintained robots would result in a longer lifetime for these systems. This could be done by creating a robot that adapts to the everchanging environment surrounding it and the changes the happen within the same robot due to aging. Now a lot of R&D have already taken place on the adaptability of the robots change in environment, but little have been done on the changes within the robot itself. This could be done by teaching the self maintaining robot to adapt its software depending on what changes it have in its hardware (robot structure in general). This is done by gathering information using highly advanced sensor systems and then behaving accordingly using its actuators. This could be done using complex algorithms. (Sekiguchi, 2005)

6 Comparisons
Although Corrective maintenance and Time-Based maintenance have been showed to not be the best option they are still the norm in traditional industry. Illustration 3 shows six failure models for any industrial equipment. According to Hashemian & Bean (2011) only 11% of failures are determined by a certain amount of time, so a time based maintenance approach is valid.

Figure 6 Failure Curves (Hashemian & Bean, 2011)

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Design Methods

However, nearly 90% of failures are not related with a period of time working, but the period of a device working is never fixed and will vary from one to another, depending on the circumstances of using. In consequence, predictive maintenance or self-maintenance might be the best approach. Whiles predictive maintenance uses technology to forecast an imminent flaw the decision and knowledge still remains on the maintenance crew; in comparison in selfmaintenance approach, the system takes the responsibility of decision whether carrying out an action or not.
Group
Corrective

Action
Corrective (CM) Preventive (PM) Predictive (PdM)

Policy
Failurebased (FBM) Time/Usedbased (T/UBM) Conditionbased (CBM)

Description
Carried out only after a breakdown Carried out after a specified amount of time Carried out when a given system parameter exceeds a value Improving of design

Focus on
Failure

Degree of Drawback development

old practice High breakdown time well developed, Inefficient most applied developed/ High initial increasing investment implementation on market developed Affecting to all the aspect of a organization Immature technology

Precautionary

Time

Monitoring / Sensors

State-of-the-art

Proactive (PaM)

Design-out (DOM)

Management / Design

The machine System on decides when the Intelligence development maintenance occurs Table 1 Action / Policy maintenace types (personal compilation based on the document)

SelfMaintenance

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Nonetheless, further research must be done to achieve the self-maintenance technology and implement it in the industry. On the other hand, many case of studies and researches have been found related to predictive maintenance, since this technology has became affordable and the benefits justify the cost and complexity of implementing it (Mobley, 2002).

7 Conclusion
As one can conclude, maintenance is an ever ending process in industry and therefore a lot must be done in this sector so that this area would become more efficient and hence more profitable to a company. Improvements have been done in this sector but more needs to be done so as to always try to maximize the up time of a system and hence decreasing the down time of machines. Latest technologies (such as self maintenance) might still be too risky for a company to implement them because they are very complex, expensive, and new, but as further research on optimizing this system is done, the maintenance sector will soon be shifting towards this new technology.

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8 Reference
Chalifoux Alan, B. J. (1999). Reliability Centered Maintenance Guide: Operating a More Effective Maintenance Program. USA. Hashemian, H. M., & Bean, W. C. (2011). State-of-the-Art Predictive Maintenance Techniques. Ieee Transactions On Instrumentation And Measurement, 60(10). Labib, A. W. (2006). Next Generation Maintenance Systems: Towards the Design of a Selfmaintenance Machine (pp. 213-217). 4th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics. Lee, J., Ghaffari, M., & Elmeligy (2011), S. Self- maintenance and engineering immune systems: Towards smarter machines and manufacturing systems. Annual Reviews in Control, 2011, Vol.35(1), pp.111-122, 35(1). Liggan, P., & Lyons, D. (2011). Applying Predictive Maintenance Techniques to Utility Systems. Pharmaceutical Engineering, 31(6), 1-7. Lung, B., Morel, G., & Leger, J. B. (2003). Proactive maintenance strategy for harbour crane operation improvement. Robotica, 21, 313-324. Marmier, F. (2009). Proactive, dynamic and multi-criteria scheduling of maintenance activities. International Journal of Production Research, 47(8), 2185-2201. Mobley, R. (2002). An introduction to predictive maintenance [Internet resource]. Amsterdam ; New York: Amsterdam ; New York : Butterworth-Heinemann. Muller, A., Suhner, M.-C., & Iung, B. (2008). Formalisation of a new prognosis model for supporting proactive maintenance implementation on industrial system. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 93(2), 234-253. Murthy, D. N. P., Kobbacy, K. A. H., & Dawsonera. (2007). Complex system maintenance handbook. Berlin ; London: Berlin ; London : Springer. Patton Joseph, D. (1983). Preventive maintenance. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall for the Instrument Society of America. Sekiguchi, N. (2005). Learning of body sense and body image for mobile robot with visual sensors. Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics. Proceedings, 2005 IEEE/ASME International Conference on;pp. 1269-1274. Wang, H. (2002). A survey of maintenance policies of deteriorating systems. European Journal of Operational Research, Vol.139(3), pp.469-489, 139(3). Wang, M.-H., Zhou, D., Chuan, L. V., & Zhao, M. (2010). A discussion of using self-maintenance technology to achieve high reliability of equipment. (IEEE Computer Society).