It is no surprise that those who enter the maintenance field are mechanics at heart. These are people who possess a native love for machinery and the thrill that comes from making broken things run again. Those of us who lack mechanical aptitude have great appreciation for the craftsman who instinctively knows just where the problem is and how to fix it.

Yet today’s reliability-conscious world is changing the maintenance persona, taking it in a direction away from the macho image of the past. It’s no longer politically correct to yearn for the meltdown or the perfect storm. Fading too is the sense of pride that came with going into battle, wrench in hand, to press the limits of one’s mechanical proficiency. Perhaps a sad reality to some, but a reality nonetheless.

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It can take just one breakdown of a critical machine to spin an entire plant into an immediate production halt. At this point, it is too late for the plant manager to do anything but call a service technician, then gasp for air while counting the lost production.

Each time a breakdown occurs, a manager vows to begin a rigid maintenance program as soon as time and money permits. But that never happens. Sound familiar?

With all of the attention maintenance advances have received in recent years in the trade press and through technical shows and conferences, it is hard to imagine that any lant would not have implemented an improved maintenance program. Yet advanced maintenance techniques commonly are neglected. Selecting a program that fits the needs of a particular plant environment can be a difficult task.

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The field of maintenance technology is going through a revolution of change. Gone are the days when a machine had a predictable service life, after which it was replaced, continuing the cycle. Today, machinery and equipment can be maintained to achieve useful operating lives many times that attainable just a few years ago.

Historically we’ve relied on the popular practice of predictive maintenance and condition monitoring to combat rising maintenance costs. Today we implement predictive maintenance with greater confidence and precision. These early warnings have proven effective at reducing the magnitude of failure and amount of unscheduled downtime; however, no real progress has been made in reducing frequency. Any maintenance strategy targeting the reduction of failure frequency must address lhe fundamental causes of failure. Such a strategy of eliminating causes would be “proactive” to failure, not “reactive” to failure.

This approach, known as proactive maintenance, is the latest and most promising wave of new maintenance technology. Its fundamental and logical approach seems likely to gamer deeply entrenched inroads into the cost-driven maintenance industry this decade. Case studies documenting cost reductions exceeding 90% have provided a solid lead for others to follow seeking similar savings.

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With the widespread use of plant-level particle counters, maintenance organizations are becoming more sophisticated and skilled in the management and control of oil cleanliness. This has led to the discovery of a host of new tactics and practices that involve combining the particle counter with other important onsite oil analysis tools and methods.

Contamination can be defined as any unwanted substance or energy that enters or contacts the oil. Contaminants can appear in many forms, and can be highly destructive to the oil, its additives and machine surfaces. It is often overlooked as a source of failure because its impact is usually slow and imperceptible yet, given time, the damage is analogous to eating up the machine from the inside out. While it is not practical to attempt to eradicate contamination from in-service lubricants, control of contaminant levels within acceptable limits can be accomplished and is vitally important.

Contaminants such as particles, moisture, soot, heat, air, glycol, fuel, detergents and process fluids are commonly found in industrial lubricants and hydraulic fluids. However, particle contamination is typically recognized as the most destructive to the oil and machine, which explains why the particle counter is the most widely used instrument in oil analysis today. Additionally, the central strategy to its success in reducing maintenance costs and increasing machine reliability is proactive maintenance.

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According to major industries throughout the world, it’s time to throw out your old ideas on machine maintenance. The costsaving trend is toward a maintenance program that targets the root causes of machine wear and failure. Predictive and preventive methods are out: pro-active maintenance is in.

Why? Because proactive maintenance methods are currently saving industries of all sizes thousands, even millions of dollars on machine maintenance every year. This concept of saving large amounts on maintenance, however, may be tough for some to grasp.

According to DuPont, “maintenance is the largest single controllable expenditure in a plant: In many companies it often exceeds annual net profit.”‘ Add to this the fact that up to 90% of some companies’ maintenance work involves expensive (and productivity-killing) breakdown repair, and you can easily see the predicament. The problem of costly maintenance has truly reached a serious level, but as some companies have found out, and more come to realize every day, their maintenance costs can be cut drastically by establishing a “proactive” line of defense.

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The field of maintenance technology is going through a revolution of change. Gone are the days when a machine had a predictable service life, after which it was replaced, continuing the cycle. Today, machinery and equipment can be maintained to achieve useful operating Iives many times more attainable than just a few years ago.

The 1980s bore the popular practice of predictive maintenance and condition monitoring to combat rising maintenance costs. In the 1990s, we implement predictive maintenance with greater confidence and precision. These early warnings have proven effective at reducing the magnitude of failure and amount of unscheduled downtime; however, no real progress has been made in reducing frequency. Any maintenance strategy targeting the reduction of failure frequency must address the fundamental causes of failure. Such a strategy of eliminating causes would be “proactive” to failure, not “reactive” to failure.

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Indeed it’s hard to justify spending time and money on things that aren’t yet broken when your maintenance staff is hog-tied, fixing the things that have broken. When breakdowns occur… well, you know the drill… not much else gets done until things are up and running again.

Let’s face it, breakdown maintenance is just plain unruly. It’s defiant, won’t conform to a schedule, and belies the budget. Breakdown maintenance is destructive and wasteful. It highjacks precious manpower and robs resource-limited organizations of operating capital. And worst of all, it has an obscene sense of timing.

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Recently, maintenance managers and corporate executives have shown a greater interest in rising maintenance costs and failure rates. The realization of the need to curb these costs has logically brought about the field of proactive maintenance. This is a program that concentrates on minimizing downtime and maximizing machine life.

This paper discusses proactive contamination control for hydraulic and lubricating systems and describes its three step implementation process. Proactive maintenance begins with establishing appropriate cleanliness targets for each individual machine pursuant to machine specific criteria. This step sets the goal or benchmarks for each machine. The second step involves the process of selecting and implementing contaminant removal devices such as filters and separators necessary to” achieve the specified target cleanliness level. The final step is the routine monitoring of machine cleanliness at frequencies based on the previously established cleanliness target and the application conditions. This final step closes the loop and insures that “control” of fluid contaminant levels is achieved.

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