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M A I N T E N A N C E
Machinery and Equipment MRO
December 2020
IS IIOT THE FUTURE OF MAINTENANCE? BY JAMES REYES-PICKNELL
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lant and equipment monitoring is very basic to most maintenance programs, even if it is not done by maintainers. Condition monitoring (CM), as it is known, can account for a third or more of your maintenance program budget, if you are taking full advantage of it. You can do it with various hand-held or permanently installed technologies, or with the human senses. Often it is operators who apply their senses doing rounds, and noticing when things are not quite right. They may not know what is wrong, but they know something is amiss. They contact maintenance, who typically responds with a technician and some hand held monitoring tools. When you’ve “diagnosed” the problem, you can plan a course of action – job plan, arrange parts and other resources, and schedule the downtime when it convenient. It’s that ability to act in our own time, not when the machine breaks down under load, that gives us value from CM.
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Waiting for breakdowns is expensive and risky. Acting proactively eliminates much of the risk and enables us to avoid major business losses. The “new game” in town is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which is already making big splashes in the world of CM. Here’s a look at the impact it will have on maintenance in the not too distant future. For a long time, we have had sensors for motion, ultrasound, light, temperature, vibration and more. Some are installed in or on equipment, and wired to monitoring analyzers, while others are carried around, and moved from machine to machine. For decades, these have been helping companies to detect failures in early stages, so that they take action to minimize the consequences of the failures they are detecting. Handheld stethoscopes, screwdrivers held onto bearing housings, and hands-on equipment, have been replaced with vibration sensors, temperature probes, ul-
trasonic and thermal imaging. Some equipment comes with continuous monitoring; diesel generator sets or packaged compressor units have temperature, vibration, oil pressure, and other monitors installed, all sending signals back to a monitoring panel. Someone had to monitor the panel – often maintainers. CM technicians can perform rounds and monitor other equipment, at least periodically. Companies will do that for you. Many of us have had a great deal of success with this – with many “saves,” but some were missed. This monitoring, if done by a contractor, is often too infrequent, but even with the misses, the saves can make it worthwhile. CM is of great value in giving advanced warning of failures about to happen. The more frequently you monitor, the more likely you will be to catch failures. Monitoring a vibration signal once a month is not enough to catch all failures of rotating equipment that move through a period of degradation within weeks. Installing permanent sensors enables continuous monitoring, but it was very expensive. You would need to install the devices, wire them, and set up a monitoring station. The biggest cost was often the wiring. Someone needed training in the monitoring technology to interpret the signals and makes the judgement calls about what is a failure. Companies will do continuous online monitoring for you, and tell you when a problem is detected. Using them you can have your equipment monitored from anywhere. This may be less costly than training your own technicians, but will limit the list of equipment monitored to only critical production assets. Because of cost, these installations have been used by the largest companies. They can afford the contract monitoring or train their own technicians. Smaller operations with thinner margins could not. They lived with (and live with) the risk of surprise failures and consequences of failures. They can’t afford those failures, and a big one could put them out of business, but they really had no option that they deemed viable. Smaller organizations often lacked technical expertise to examine these options. Now IIoT has changed that. It is removing much of the cost barrier to companies that couldn’t afford the permanently installed hardware, wiring, software, and training of their technicians. It is also opening up more than just critical major machinery to continuous monitoring.
Photo: Getty Images / FG Trade
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2021-01-13 8:48 AM
