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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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Silent Assumptions of Bearing Reliability
There are several important silent assumptions of bearing reliability. However, before I address these assumptions, some even more basic assumptions and statements of fact must be established. 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 to Make Your Oil Analysis Program Produce More Alerts
I want bad news fast. Why? Problems tend to compound. Rarely do they heal themselves. Instead, the worse things get, the faster they get worse. As time passes, the cost of repair and lost production can soar exponentially. 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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Philosophies of Transformational Change and ICML 55
I first met Ron Moore in the early 1990s. He is known as an icon in the reliability community and is the author of an excellent book entitled What Tool? When? This book tackles a delicate subject that is both difficult and controversial. 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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Detection Zone Coding for More Efficient Condition Monitoring
These days, reliability professionals are faced with diverse options related to technologies and methods to detect, troubleshoot and remediate problems. Figure 1 is a simple example of the available options to collect data and arrive at decisions regarding the health of machinery and machine components. Read More
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Proactive Maintenance is the Cost Reduction Strategy for Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines
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. 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