Category: RCA & Failure Analysis
Jim Fitch authored articles & papers
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Root Cause Analysis for Lubrication Failures
Knowing when a piece of equipment is going to fail (predictive maintenance) is much more difficult than making it last long (proactive maintenance). Even more complex is root cause analysis (RCA) which is performed postmortem, like an autopsy. Read More
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Be Alert to Heat as Both a Contaminant and a Symptom
Excessive heat is a severe contaminant. It wreaks havoc on oil (chemically and physically) and retards lubricant performance by increasing wear, corrosion and friction. Friction and wear cause more heat, which sends the machine into a cycle of despair. Read More
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Be Proactive to Avoid Root Cause Fault Bubbles
No warning or short-warning failures are the worst kind. Think of a tire. It can wear out slowly over thousands of driving miles or rupture suddenly, at full highway speed, from a random piece of road debris. You can monitor tread loss over time and conveniently schedule a tire change. Conversely, who could predict the… Read More
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Don’t Forget Lubricant Criticality When Designing Oil Analysis Programs
It is intuitively obvious that smart maintenance decisions require a heightened sense of both the probability and consequences of machine failure. Read More
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How and Why Machines Wear Out
According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus and luminary tribologist Ernest Rabinowicz, there are three things that cause machines to lose their usefulness: obsolescence, accidents and surface degradation. Without question, obsolescence is fundamental to the evolution of engineering and technology. Read More
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Performing a Failure Scene Investigation
As head of Noria’s failure investigation group, I’ve led many interesting studies in search of failure root causes and remedies. These include missile system failures, highway accidents, helicopter crashes, and turbine-generator wrecks. Most of these nearly 100 investigations were substantially hampered by errors made in collecting and preserving evidence. Read More
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The Power of Root Cause Pre-failure Analysis
Abnormal wear is not like a bad rash, which tends to go away on its own in time. Instead, it’s more like early-stage cancer, which requires intervention and treatment. Oil analysis has exceptional abilities to detect abnormal conditions, both root cause (like dirty oil) and predictive (active failure in progress). Read More
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Contaminant Monitoring Targets Root Causes of Machinery Problems
A proactive maintenance approach has been particularly successful in reducing or eliminating one of the most serious equipment maintenance problems: contamination of lubricant or hydraulic fluid systems. Read More
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The Richness of Machine Failure
The definition of an asset is something that delivers future value (such as a machine that produces your widgets year after year). Conversely, a liability is something that can consume your assets in the future (such as negligent or faulty reliability practices). Like an endless string of mortgage payments, the long-term cost of such liabilities… Read More