Section No.

: 7 / Title: Condition Based Maintenance

Techniques
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Names of participants: Krishna Kagrana

Radhika Kajarekar

Name of the Institute: Sri Savitribai Phule Polytechnic, Pune

INTRODUCTION

In a growing global market productivity is playing a key role to stay competitive, for any
manufacturing company. Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) is maintenance when need
arises. CBM is such a technology which strives to identify incipient faults before they become
critical which enables more accurate planning of the preventive maintenance. CBM is costly, but
the costs can make easy on the pocket if used on the correct time.
Improvement in Product quality, productivity and reduction in cost of manufacturing can be
achieved by switching over to new and economic technology and by increasing the equipment
availability and reliability. The cost of product must be lowest with highest grade of quality.
Here, maintenance is playing important role in any business. Plainly stated, the growing cost of
maintenance is a serious business aspect and maintenance is the largest single controllable
expenditure in a plant or industry.

CONDITION MONITORING

Condition monitoring involves determining the condition of a machine and its rate of change of
measured parameters in order to determine the maintenance requirement. The condition of
machine may be determined continuously or at regular intervals by monitoring measurable
parameters.
CBM is carried out for two main reasons:
1.To detect sudden changes in condition that could lead to catastrophic failure, particularly for
machinery that could represent a threat to the health and safety of people, or cause an
environmental incident. This is known as 'Machinery Protection' or 'Protective Monitoring'.
2. To identify the early onset of incipient failures so that a prediction can be made about their
most likely progress and suitable actions can be planned. This is known as 'Predictive
Monitoring' or 'Predictive Maintenance', and is often abbreviated to 'PDM'. Potential benefits:
In the year 1988, Technology for Energy Corporation studied impact of condition monitoring
over 500 plants in USA, UK Canada and Australia. A significant fact emerged out that
systematic implementation of condition monitoring can reduce the maintenance cost of about
more than 50 percent. Other benefits achieved by the plants having condition monitoring
activities are as follows:
 Reduction in forced shutdown
 Reduction in spares inventory
 Reduction in shutdown time
 Improvement in machine reliability and availability
 Increasing equipment operating life
 Improvement in safety margin
 Improvement in machine performance & output quality
 Increasing bottom line profile

TYPES OF CBM TASKS

o Temperature Measurement: It helps detect potential failures related to temperature
failure.Measured temperatures can indicate problems such as increase in mechanical
friction,degraded heat transfer, and poor electrical connections.
o Dynamic Monitoring: It involves measuring energy emitted from mechanical equipment
in the form of vibration, pulses, and acoustic effects. Measured changes in the vibration
characteristics can lead to problems like wear, maintenance, misalignment and damage.
o Oil Analysis: It can indicate problems like oil contamination, improper oil consistency,
improper oil consistency(improper amount of additives).
o Corrosion Monitoring: Corrosion Monitoring helps provide an indication of the extent of
corrosion rate and corrosion state.
o Electrical Testing and Monitoring: It involves measuring changes in the system
properties such as resistance, conductivity, dielectric strength, and potential.
 o Observation and Surveillance: They include audio, video and touch inspections. These
techniques help detect problems such as loose/worn parts, leaking equipment, poor
pipe/electrical connections, steam leaks, and surface roughness changes.
o Performance Monitoring: It predicts problems by monitoring changes in variables.

CHALLENGES
Despite its usefulness, there are several challenges to the use of CBM. First and most important
of all, the initial cost of CBM is high. It requires improved instrumentation of the equipment.
Often the cost of sufficient instruments can be quite large, especially on equipment that is
already installed. Therefore, it is important for the installer to decide the importance of the
investment before adding CBM to all equipment. A result of this cost is that the first generation
of CBM in the oil and gas industry has only focused on vibration in heavy rotating equipment .

Secondly, introducing CBM will invoke a major change in how maintenance is performed, and
potentially to the whole maintenance organization in a company. Organizational changes are in
general difficult.

Also, the technical side of it is not always as simple. Even if some types of equipment can easily
be observed by measuring simple values as vibration (displacement or acceleration), temperature
or pressure, it is not trivial to turn this measured data into actionable knowledge about health of
the equipment.

An example of CBM of a rail vehicle

ADVANTAGES & DISADVANTAGES

CBM has some advantages over planned maintenance:

o Improved system reliability

o Decreased maintenance costs
o Decreased number of maintenance operations causes decreasing of human error influence
Disadvantages are:

o High installation costs, for minor equipment items more than value of equipment
o Unpredictable maintenance periods are causing costs to be divided unequally
o Increased number of parts (CBM installation) that need maintenance and checking

CONCLUSION
CBM today due to its costs is not used for less important parts of machinery despite obvious
advantages. However it can be found everywhere where increased reliability and safety is
required, and in future will be even more applied.