Condition monitoring in other industries

Regardless of sector, some of the same factors apply: the need to keep plant operating at the required level of performance, reliably, at minimum cost. MBVI systems easily monitor inaccessible assets that can be difficult to monitor by conventional methods.

Around the world, pressures on cost effectiveness, quality, responsive and timely delivery, safety, environmental protection and energy efficiency are increasing in virtually every sector.

Operating equipment on a run-to-failure strategy can be very disruptive, and is more expensive than a condition-based approach because you do more work, it is done less efficiently, and is more disruptive:

• Secondary damage often occurs during the failure event, requiring more extensive corrective work;
• The unplanned nature of break-fix maintenance makes it impossible to optimise the level of spare parts, nor to optimise the scheduling of labour resources. Premium rates are often charged for labour attending a call-out at short notice, often out of hours. Premium rates are also common when shipping-in vital spares at short notice.
• The disruption to whatever the equipment was supposed to be doing is often a greater cost than the entire maintenance cost. Unplanned downtime can have negative impacts on product quality and process efficiency, as well as causing missed product delivery dates.
• And whilst the plant is out of action, you are still incurring almost all of the normal production overhead costs, paying production staff, heating, lighting, etc.

In addition, breakfix approaches make it very difficult to meet all those targets of cost effectiveness, quality, responsive and timely delivery, safety, environmental protection and energy efficiency.

One response may be to adopt a fixed-schedule Preventive Maintenance approach, but this is almost never the most cost-effective solution, as it generally involves doing un-necessary work, and can lead to LOWER reliability levels (see reliability paper here)

Condition-Based Maintenance is generally the most cost-effective strategy, achieving the inherent reliability levels of equipment with the minimum amount of work being done.

To adopt a Condition-Based maintenance strategy, you need a way to monitor the condition of your equipment. Ideally, this should be one that:

• Covers the majority of the commonly expected failure modes on this equipment. Typically this means it should cover both electrical and mechanical failure modes
• It’s not too expensive to purchase
• It is not too expensive to install, not requiring long lengths of cabling between plant and a central monitoring statio
• Does not need frequent maintenance or calibration (including replacement of batteries)
• Is robust and not vulnerable to damage of the sensors or monitoring system itself (eg accelerometers)

Because Faraday Predictive systems are installed in the electrical switchgear, not out on the equipment itself, they avoid some traditional challenges of fixed condition monitoring, including:

• Inaccessible equipment – like in-tank cargo pumps, thrusters, podded motors.
• ATEX issues – these are not a problem for Faraday Predictive systems, since the installation is all carried out in the switchroom, which is always a clean, dry, safe area.
• Cabling installation costs – often the cost of running cables from sensors on plant back to a central location for monitoring can be more expensive than the sensor system itself. Because the Faraday units are installed in the switchroom, cabling runs from sensor to the processor are very short (normally just within the cabinet itself). Communication from the processing unit to the rest of the world is done by ethernet, and many switchrooms already have ethernet network cabling installed already, again keeping the required new cable runs very short.

Case Studies in “Other Industry”

HVAC systems in prestigious entertainment venue – click here.