Magazine

  Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a strategy focused on ensuring that assets operate as designed. Implementing a reliability-centered maintenance program leads to improved reliability/uptime, as well as decreased costs. RCM categorizes equipment according to its potential impact on safety, operations, and/or maintenance budgets.  These categories provide the context central to RCM. Assets are prioritized so…

  Becoming and sustaining a high-reliability organization (HRO) requires daily actions based on a set of principles. Those principles enable individuals/teams/organizations to act on emerging problems and deploy the proper resources to resolve the problems efficiently and effectively. Maintaining high reliability requires constantly being ready for the unexpected and taking timely action. From the early…

Level up your electrical infrastructure to create a budget-friendly foundation for a connected plant. An electrical outage at your chemical plant takes several process units offline. Your operations team scrambles to figure out why and soon pulls in maintenance teams. As time passes, logistics begins scurrying to manage the growing logjam of raw materials as…

  Ultrasonic bearing analysis can provide early detection of lubrication, alignment, and out-of-balance issues. Ultrasonic analysis is an advanced technology that can provide accurate and early evaluation of bearing conditions, allowing you to detect and act on issues before asset performance deteriorates. Doing so prevents failure and reduces downtime. Here are factors to consider as…

Start with a criticality assessment to develop digital twins for your assets that will keep you ahead of maintenance and performance issues. A digital twin should be based on a three-dimensional scan of an asset that connects to key static and dynamic data about that asset. From the visual depiction, a user should be able…

Go beyond simple viscosity to fully understand how oils will perform, particularly in extreme conditions. Anyone with even a cursory understanding knows that the most important property of a lubricant is viscosity. Among other factors, viscosity determines important parameters such as oil film thickness and fluidity; the ability of the oil to flow to the…