PLANT ENGINEERING • March 2012

Don’t contribute to unnecessary maintenance costs

A condition monitoring analyst encounters many challenges. One of the primary ones is to determine when to report a defect finding. Should it be reported now or should reporting wait until the severity of the defect increases? How near is the problem that has been found to actual failure? Each of these questions is difficult to answer.
A good analyst can use the condition monitoring data that has been collected to determine the severity of the problem found. However, it is impossible to determine the time of day the identified component will actually fail.
What happens if the replacement component (bearing, etc.) requires a very long lead time to obtain? What happens if a crane has to be scheduled to remove the equipment for repair? What happens if contractors have to be scheduled to support the repair effort? What if an outage is scheduled soon and the analyst waits until afterward to report the problem?

Read my entire article For A Condition Monitoring Analyst, It’s Just The Facts