Incorporating quality auditing into condition based maintenance scheme

This paper demonstrates the idea of incorporating the concept of Quality Auditing in Condition Based Maintenance procedure in the treatment of real industrial problems. It is aimed to enhance the CBM scheme by initial elimination of design flaws in the bad performers, hence reducing the condition monitoring task to merely trending and diagnosis of machine degeneration due to operations alone. Four separate case studies are investigated. The first involved an oleoflex reactor screen, which failed due to excessively high thermal stress. This was basically an elastostatic problem with force and thermal loading. The second involved a rotating catalyst blender, shaft, which failed due to high stresses. Although dynamic in nature, the low frequency excitation categorised the system under stiffness controlled, and hence treated as an elastostatic problems with force load. The third and fourth case studies involved two vertical main oil line pumps from different oil platforms that failed due to high levels of vibration - structural dynamics problem. It is discovered that in all the cases, failures were due to deficiency in design and thus indicating that execution of quality auditing at the onset of installation could have prevented valuable maintenance and downtime loss. Frequency Response Function (FRF) techniques and computational mechanics (FEM) are utilized to establish existing design flaws and for redesigning. Existing problems, contributing to their failure in the four case studies, were identified and solutions were outlined.