The maritime industry is in many aspects using maintenance strategies from the past. Land based industry used to take influence from shipping to organise the maintenance in the 70:ties. Now industry is perusing new strategies that give better reliability and are more profitable. By focusing on reliability the indirect effects from doing the wrong maintenance can be reduced considerably. Shipping industry has from a maintenance aspect been doing the wrong things correct for many years. The opportunity is now to do the right thing correct instead.

The demand for this equipment will undoubtedly continue, but many users – particularly plant engineers and the increasing number of new energy surveyors – have been calling for affordable and user-friendly cameras which previously had only been available to specialist thermoraphers due to cost and complexity of use. This market-led demand has resulted in a new generation of cameras that combine thermal imagery with digital photography.

An important component of Borealis’ strategy is that rather than using separate condition monitoring software for their online systems, they transmit the condition data from these systems to their DCS, allowing operators to see both asset condition information and process information within a single HMI (Human Machine Interface) environment. This eliminates the need for operators to learn an entirely different system and ensures that condition data and process data are available simultaneously on the process control system. This, in turn, helps ensure that asset condition receives as much attention as process condition.

As part of a larger maintenance strategy, outsourcing the diagnostics and monitoring of critical machinery can be an effective tool in the battle to maximize asset availability and plant efficiency. In situations in which machine performance is critical but in-house analysis is not practical because of limited resources, outsourcing offers a cost-effective solution.