Lesson 6 - Maintenance

Welcome back. So, what were your thoughts?

Let us consider labour first. Predictive Maintenance has some advantages over the other maintenance approaches in two departments – maintenance and operations. For the maintenance department, the highly automated nature of PdM can enable a higher degree of efficiency. This is accomplished by the equipment itself indicating early warnings or alarms when process conditions deviate from established limits.  This requires less human interaction and continuous looking and testing for issues. With PdM, the maintenance department can focus its energies on the repair and remedy of issues rather than on the search for issues.

Predictive maintenance also benefits operations labour. As mentioned, one of the most advantageous elements of PdM is its ability to keep equipment in service for as long as possible. Only when an equipment or process condition deviates from standard will maintenance be scheduled or dispatched to perform a repair or replacement of the asset. This extended equipment run-time positively impacts the utilisation of operational labour through longer, uninterrupted periods when assets are available for use.

The Predictive Maintenance approach also has disadvantages.

• The brewery will need to invest in instrumentation (inline or portable/handheld)

• The brewery must have personnel skilled in interpreting process data or performing condition-based monitoring tasks such as oil analysis, infrared examination/thermography, amperage readings, ultrasonic and acoustic monitoring, and vibration analysis.

•  The combination of the instrumentation requirements along with skilled staff translates into high implementation costs.

Figure:  An example of a pump outfitted with condition monitoring instrumentation including vibration, tachometer, and temperature