Condition monitoring should never be limited to a single technology or method. Instead, it should combine and integrate an optimum selection of purposeful tools and tasks. Condition monitoring can be largely technology based but can also be observation or inspection based.
It has been a couple years now since the birth of my first child. I remember going to the doctor’s appointments with my wife where countless exams and tests were conducted to confirm that the pregnancy was progressing as it should. There were measurements, readings and occasionally blood tests. One of the blood tests was designed to look for genetic abnormalities. The literature on this test explained there was a chance for false positives as well as false negatives. Several samples were taken to ensure the test was performed accurately and the results could be verified.
Lubrication-related equipment failure is a problem that plagues industrial facilities of all sizes and stripes. By some estimates, it causes as much as $1 trillion a year in reactive maintenance, unplanned downtime and lost productivity across the United States. These failure rates associated with lubrication also haven’t budged in the past two decades. This is especially troubling for industrial operators who have sunk billions of dollars into sophisticated maintenance management systems and predictive maintenance tools designed specifically to reduce downtime. Still, the problem is not getting better. How can that be?
Inspection, in its most basic form, has been around forever. However, like most things in life, what you get out of an activity depends entirely on what you put in. This column is about radical reinvention of the whole concept of machine inspection. It has little to do with conventional practices of doing daily machine rounds.
Assets with moving parts rely on the consistent application of lubricants to function properly. Facility managers who work to improve their condition monitoring strategies benefit from improved asset uptime and cost reductions. These two concepts go hand-in-hand. Lubrication is an essential facet of condition monitoring.
