If your business doesn’t offer corrosion prevention, repair and maintenance, you are missing a massive segment of the painting and coatings marketplace. Corrosion is such a massive problem; some estimates put it past $1 trillion in damage to the U.S. economy each year.
Certification from an accredited organization is important. It ensures that personnel have at least a minimum degree of understanding of the subject matter. Certification is also important for compliance and liability reasons. But does having certified personnel on staff ensure the program will be a success? Is certification enough?
You cannot succeed without clearly stated goals, but you would be surprised at how many programs do not have clearly defined goals! If you believe your program has clear goals, take a moment right now to write some of them down on a piece of paper. If you can’t write them down, then you probably don’t have them! If you don’t have the right goals, you cannot come up with concise strategies and tactics for attaining them. You will not know what people, tools, data, analysis, etc., are required and you will not be able to easily measure if your goals are being met.
Published reports place the total cost of corrosion in the United States at $552 billion. Direct costs account for 50% or $276 billion which include corrosion related repairs or replacements. Indirect costs account for the other 50% and include: loss of production, environmental damage, transportation disruptions, injuries and fatalities. This paper introduces the concept of Lifetime Coating Systems (LCS). LCS is a strategically engineered maintenance program designed to match coating life with asset life for products and structures with a design life of 25 to 100 years or more. LCS uses a combination of modern maintenance principles: Preventive, Predictive, and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) versus customary Reactive Maintenance.
In 2009, Trico Services was contracted to complete an equipment lubrication audit of a large mill in the southeast that produces liner and corrugated material for containers. This audit was for roughly 2500 pieces of rotating equipment. Upon completion of the audit, Trico was to take the lubrication recommendations and input this data into the MAINTelligence software platform that the facility uses using to manage their plant lubrication programs.
Perfect balance is unachievable. Rotating machines vibrate. The only time when no vibration is perceptible is when the machines are stopped, so it is impractical to expect to find a non-vibrating machine when in operation. Balancing standards are formally defined for shop balancing, but in field balancing we have no field balancing standards, only industry guidelines. The purpose of this article is to clarify some of those guidelines for field balancing.
The approach to vibration analysis is likely the most varied practice in the industry. This is partially due to the lack of standardization, combined with an explosion of new knowledge and technologies over the last two decades. Guidelines for creating a world-class vibration program will differ immensely depending on the source of information. When designing a new policy or optimizing an existing program, it is vital to have a good understanding of the shortcomings that can be found in almost every network in operation.
It was a number of years before the OA community learned that UV spectrometers, while sensitive and accurate for measuring metals in solution, or even at small particulate levels, were not able to detect, let alone measure, particles much above a few microns in diameter. This simply was a technological limitation. Luckily, diesel engines did very well when UV spectrometric testing was employed because a good portion of the wear mechanisms in diesels is sliding wear, which tends to produce very fine particle diameters.
You may get the impression that implementing these steps will be costly and very difficult to achieve. The thing you need to bear in mind is: “You are already spending the money.” The only question is: “Are you getting the result from your pumping systems that you are looking for?” If you can create an environment that allows your entire team to become engaged in implementing these concepts, it will be the best investment you ever made.
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Torbjorn Idhammar is the blog manager for MaintenanceWorld.com.
A maintenance and reliability management consultant, Torbjorn has spent 25+ years in the profession and provides advice to clients around the world.
Robin Kent is the site administrator for MaintenanceWorld.com.
She is responsible for reviewing submitted content for the site and ensuring that it provides value to the readers of the site.
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