Predictive maintenance!: to do or let die

Abstract

In a competitive world all equipment must maximize its availability. The predictive maintenance objective is to follow the evolution of its use and the tear that results from the dynamics of components. Nowadays, with the evolution of technology it is possible to check and detect almost every problem. In critical organizations, like paper industry, chemical industry, oil industry, and so on, it is necessary to follow the “health” of the most part of equipment in general, and the vital ones in particular, because even small errors can cause a lot of monetary damages. This type of companies need to check every detail of their assets. The majority of the companies use a lot of technology to evaluate the condition of each critical component. They want to know the value of on-condition variables like vibration monitoring offline, vibration monitoring online, thermograph, oil analysis, and so on. However, having lot of offers of equipment for diagnosis and a lot of offers of maintenance services by specialized companies, the factories didn’t increase the predictive maintenance level because they aren´t sensitive enough to do that. The pressure that the international economic market has in companies causes factories to work every minute they can before equipment and components break. Companies try to delay the time of each maintenance intervention, but this delay, when it is done without on-condition accompaniment increases the total maintenance costs, which increases the total value of equipment maintenance, both direct and indirect. In this case, the predictive maintenance can have an important role to increase the production time. These are the main topics that will be handled in the paper industry, with focus on vibration monitoring applied in a paper factory, including maintenance analysis versus cost analysis.