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Simple Steps to Hydraulic System Maintenance

“Are you spending money on hydraulics training and not seeing results?”

By Ricky Smith CMRP

Most companies spend a lot of money training their maintenance personnel to troubleshoot a hydraulic system every year and yet continue to receive the same results. If we focused on preventing system failure then we could spend less time and money on troubleshooting a hydraulic system. We normally accept hydraulic system failure but it is important to remind yourself that hydraulic failure is not the norm. Let’s spend the time and money to eliminate hydraulic failure rather than preparing for failure. I worked for Kendall Company in the 1980’s and we changed our focus from reactive to proactive maintenance on our hydraulic systems and eliminated unscheduled hydraulic failure. Join me as we talk about the right way to perform maintenance on a hydraulic system utilizing the “Maintenance Best Practices”.

 

Simultaneous Testing

For inexpensive components and inexpensive tests, simultaneous tests involve many components under test loads/conditions at the same time for the purpose of quickly acquiring data and producing test analysis as the failures occur. In simultaneous testing the suspensions (censored data) become important details for use in the statistical analysis. Most simultaneous tests are accelerated to generate the data in a short period of time although this carries the risk of introducing unexpected failure modes (but this can also be useful information for anticipating field failures).

Six Common Errors when Solving Problems

Organizations apply a variety of tools to solve problems, improve operations and increase reliability—many times without success. Why? More than likely, they make one or a combination of six common errors:

1. They focus on blame.
2. Conducting root-cause analysis, they focus on finding one “cause.”
3. They consider a problem description and problem analysis the same thing.
4. They start an investigation by trying to find the problem, instead of identifying an organization’s
goals
5. They apply “buzzwords” instead of the basic technique of cause-and-effect.
6. They use select problem-solving tools for select circumstances.

Overcoming these errors involves knowing why they happen and how to prevent them. Armed with this knowledge, both employees and managers can improve problem-solving in any organization.

Six Steps to A Healthy Machine

Introduction: Most condition assessment programs in industry concentrate on one or two technologies. The people, procedures and practices are tailored to those technologies. Application of the technology is optimized, rather than the results. This paper advocates a machine centered, as opposed to a technology centered, approach to the assessment of the condition of machinery. Just as your physician uses a variety of tests and evaluations to assess your state of health, we should do the same for our machinery. To do less means we make decisions based on incomplete information.

SKF Assists TOTAL E&P Indonesia with Their First Combined Maintenance & Inspection Strategy Program

All oil and gas exploration and processing projects should be supported with a tailored strategy for their maintenance and inspection requirements, and facilities should be started up with their Maintenance and Inspection program properly defined by function and should be readied in systems that will support the execution of that work. These are typically big support activities covering all equipment and their sub-assemblies.

SKF Predictive Maintenance (PdM) Benefits Overall Maintenance Strategy at Linde Gas Plants in China

The Linde Group is a world leading gases and engineering company operating in more than 100 countries. With such large and widespread successful operations it is no surprise that maintenance activities are well run and that the company is no stranger to advanced monitoring techniques and equipment. In USA and UK particularly, but also elsewhere in the world, on-line machine monitoring has been used for a number of years at Linde plants. And, at its Shanghai headquarters it has a large and impressive ‘remote operations centre' where it monitors and tracks the process operations of all it's major gas plants in China 24 hours a day.

Skilled Workforce in the 21st Century

The purpose of this study is to explore the upcoming changes that are viewed by many as the ‘Skilled Workforce Crisis.' The importance of the "Skilled Workforce in the 21st Century" research and study project is that it has been developed independently and without funding from any particular interest. Its authors felt that it was important to the Reliability & Maintenance industry to fully understand what we saw as the real issues related to the present evolution of business and R&M.

Snakes, Hazard Recognition & RPN - What Is a Hazard?

By Stan Moore

What Is a Hazard? Any situation that could result in a preventable injury or illness.

Expounding on that, a hazard is any situation or condition that could present a threat to equipment, the environment, limb, or life. Hazards can be caused by human actions, or they can exist in the environment and pose no safety issues until there is interaction.

Software Increases Confidence in Decision Making

Reaching 99.8% Reliability by Amy Davidson

The vast amount of diagnostic information available today about the condition of critical production assets - information that can be of real value to decision makers -- can be confusing and even overwhelming. However, when information from hundreds or even thousands of separate sources is consolidated and organized on a single platform, a more complete picture of the health and operation of critical assets, or an entire process, emerges.

 

Software Reliability

Software does not wear out but it does fail and most failures are due to specification errors and code errors with only a few errors in copying or use. The only software repair is by reprogramming and adding safety factors is almost impossible. Software reliability improves by finding errors and fixing the errors but estimating the number of errors which canse failures is extremely difficult as many branches of software code may lie dormant and unused until special events occur to make the latent failures obvious. Software failures are not often time related but are more software code page dependent. Software reliability is improved by extensive testing to disclose the failures and then fixing them to repeat the test all over again to validate the fix did not generate more failures and to continue the search of other latent defects.

Sound Collectors, Can You Hear Me Now?

I received an email from a reliability engineer and loyal subscriber to Uptime Magazine and the "Ultrasonic War Stories" newsletter. As an advocate of sound technologies, he knew I would be interested in some pictures regarding "sound collectors" that he found on the Internet titled, "Before Radar."

Sound collectors, such as sound mirrors and acoustic horns, were once used as an early warning system to detect approaching enemy aircraft. The mirrors were not parabolic, but actually spherical. Some were made of concrete, others spherical carvings cut from the side of a cliff or rock wall to collect sound. In Figure 1 (left to right), you have a rectangular 200-foot curved mirror, a 20-foot sound mirror and a 30-foot sound mirror. Note a vertical pole that held a microphone in the center of the sound mirror.

Squirrel Stores - How Much do Squirrel Stores Cost

By Phill Slater

The following example demonstrates the inventory effect of squirrel stores.

 

Squirrel Stores and Why You Would Be Nuts to Keep Them

by Phillip Slater

Breaking the locks was the only option. It was 2:00am and Line 1 had stopped completely.

Standardization of Absolute Vibration Level and Damage Factors for Machinery Health Monitoring

An attempt has been made to study the vibration level of various machine tools to explore the possibility of establishing the standard vibration level. Till today no vibration standards are available for determining the acceptable vibration level for specific machine tools. However there are some standards available that gives an indication of machinery health based on overall vibration level like ISO 2372 (RMS velocity in the frequency range 10 Hz to 1kHz) and Canadian specifications (RMS velocity in the frequency range 10Hz to 10kHz). But these standards are made for general purpose machinery like pumps, motors, generators and so on. The present study is aimed at establishing the vibration standards for precision machine tools. The machine tools are first segregated and then their vibration data are analyzed for determining the normal vibration level and damage factors (DF). After refining and fixing the vibration standards obtained, they can be used to assess the machinery health.

Start Early & Stick With a Plan - Developing Marketable Engineering Skills

For the foreseeable future, the "job of the future" will exist in a world that wrestles with issues of outsourcing, offshore design and manufacturing, and generally uncertain employment prospects. Among the job seekers, aspiring engineers need to develop effective ways of finding and keeping employment in this murky environment.

Guidance is helpful as you ponder the question of where you should be headed in this sea of instability. Today we live at a time when professed experts expound diametrically opposite views and often have the audacity of serving up their views with an air of infallibility. The answer as to where you should head is multi-faceted, but being balanced and learning a marketable skill instead of going after an ill-defined "education" is certainly a good start.

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