Preventive Maintenance of Equipment

  1. What is Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is a routine maintenance done for every piece of equipment which can either reduces the downtimes or can cause unexpected breakdowns of equipment. In food processing and manufacturing industry, there are equipment sand machines running continuously, and hence the preventive maintenance plays an important role in such industries. Apart from process equipments, some major items such as electrical equipment like transformers, motors and other heady utility equipments fall under the periodic preventive maintenance chart.

  1. What does Preventive Maintenance Include and its Need?

Preventive maintenance includes some checkpoints for every piece of equipment. These checkpoints are related to quality, safety, and productivity. For this, we must maintain a Maintenance checklist for every single Equipment as per their PM schedule. There are different types of equipment like process and core electrical equipment so there are Checklist as per different time periods like a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly check.

Preventive Maintenance has the following benefits like:

  • Reduces the unexpected breakdowns.
  • Improves the reliability of the process equipment’s.
  • Makes the smooth operation of the system.
  • Improves the efficiency and life of the process equipment’s.
  • Saves running cost of equipment’s.
  1. Types Of Preventive Maintenance

There are two types of PM

  1. Time Based Maintenance
  2. Conditional Based Maintenance

In Time based maintenance there is some schedules for every equipment maintenance as per standards for Example Transformer, it has different parts, and they have different schedule to maintain like Silica gel breather is part of transformer it should be check on daily basis so like that there is another parts which has different schedules. In Time Based Maintenance Cleaning, Lubrication, inspection and Tightening (CLIT) has to be perform on equipment so this helps to run machine in smooth manner.

The Conditional based Maintenance (CBM) is done for some critical equipment’s for that we have to monitor our critical machines and such machines that we can stop without affecting the process. For such machines we must do CBM.

For this we must make daily Look Listen feel (LLF) schedule for the critical process equipment’s. According to that if there is any abnormality found then plan maintenance for that equipment.

The goal of condition-based maintenance is to continuously monitor Equipment’s to spot impending failure, so maintenance can be proactively scheduled before the failure occurs. The basic idea of Conditional based maintenance is by use of real time monitoring we can get problems or abnormalities before breakdown occurs, so this causes our maintenance team will get enough lead time to repair and this also helps in reducing the future downtimes occurring because of such abnormalities.

  1. Suggested PM checklist for Electrical equipment’s
  • Transformer

 

    • Weekly Visual Inspection of Transformer

 

    • Quarterly Inspection of Transformer

    •       Yearly Inspection of Transformer    

  • Motor

 

Weekly maintenance schedule for Motors

 

  1. Conclusion

In Order to reduce the future downtimes, breakdowns and make system or process more effective preventive maintenance is required in process industries. also, it improves availability of the equipment. This will help to improves the productivity, quality, safety in process industries.

  1. References