Abstract
The success of the maintenance department of a company will be mainly judged by how much it contributes towards smooth operations, which should eventually lead to higher turnover, and this is no different for the cement industry. For a company with an approximate downtime cost of £340,000/day, a breakdown of any of its critical machines will surely limit its chances of overall cost optimisation as well as profit maximisation. One of the greatest challenges facing the realisation of this cost-saving opportunity is ensuring that the lignite plant runs at a high reliability (≥95%). In order to ensure the optimum operation of this workshop, four (4) of its major machines have been considered the most critical, through the principles of criticality analysis. The technical specifications of the selected critical machines were considered in proposing a condition monitoring system, which will use vibration analysis as its preliminary fault detection and diagnostic technique, while other condition monitoring techniques such as oil/wear debris analysis and thermography would serve as confirmatory and complimentary techniques. A comparison between the approximate costs of setting up the proposed condition monitoring system and the approximate costs of the critical equipment, showed that the cost of the proposed condition monitoring system forms only a minute fraction of the equipments’ costs.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 50-55 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Maintenance & Asset Management |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 4 |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2013 |