Maintenance is an essential operational component for any plant or factory. Daily maintenance, in particular, is the sum of tasks that must be completed in order to keep a plant in top condition and avoid shutdowns and other costly consequences.
The article will cover:-
- Difficulty of Daily Maintenance Tasks
- Planning Daily Maintenance Tasks
- Preventative Maintenance
- Common Causes of Disruptions during Daily Maintenance
Maintenance Planning and Daily Maintenance Tasks :-
Preventative maintenance is the practice of undertaking measures to avoid failures and breakdowns by preventing misuse, physical damage and wear. It is a good practice to inspect your plant in order to discover any of these issues before they cause a serious problem. A preventative maintenance package should include inspections and necessary repairs, replacement of worn components, adjustment and calibration. In order to accurately plan preventative maintenance tasks you need to know what the expected life span of each component is in your system. The goal with preventative maintenance is not just repair work but also pro-active replacement or repair to extend service life for as long as possible.
Plan your preventative maintenance tasks based on the anticipated age of each component and the possible failure modes. Learning about each of these, you can then develop replacement strategies for all components including acquiring spare parts throughout the warranty period. If your plan is to replace a component due to expected wear, then now is the time to buy and gather replacement parts for all components in your plant.
Daily Maintenance Tips for Your Industrial Plant :-
Daily maintenance tasks are also known as system daily tasks and operate within a plant's primary maintenance window, i.e., when it is too risky to perform major repairs or replace key components but before shutdowns and other costly consequences can occur. To perform daily tasks safely and effectively, it is important to have a clear understanding of the vulnerabilities and limitations of your plant's equipment.
Outages and Unplanned Maintenance :-
Plants are susceptible to downtime due to unplanned maintenance and any possible failure of equipment. This is especially true with nuclear, coal, oil and gas plants that may experience a sudden shutdown due to a damaging failure. A thorough understanding of the cause of the outage can determine if it can be avoided in future and prevent significant loss if a similar event occurs again.
Unplanned maintenance usually occurs due to human error and improper operation of equipment that causes damage to equipment or shutdown of the plant due to overheating. It is important for your plant's team members to know what actions could be taken in order to prevent an outage from happening again or at least minimize its impact on your revenue streams.
Common Causes of Disruptions during Daily Maintenance :-
Technical and Other Events are often caused by or are the reason for unplanned outages. The first step is to identify the root cause of the event (whether human error or a machine failure) by reviewing and analyzing your plant's operating parameters. Once you have identified all possible causes, it would be important to understand their impact on the plant operations. This way you can try to avoid them in future and predict their cost and duration in order to minimize their impact on any revenue stream, i.e., production, maintenance or safety.