Up Time Magazine- April/May 2008 - (Page 18) reliability upload Heavy Duty RCM Lockheed Martin’s Classical RCM on a 30-Ton Overhead Crane by Terry Spychalski, Terry Finnegan, Mac Smith and Tim Allen W hen you have a satellite worth 300 million dollars hanging from your crane hook, there is a very real incentive for safe, reliable, problem free material handling. Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company (LMSSC) has more than one hundred cranes lifting extremely high value, critical flight hardware loads. These are often one-of-a-kind items and any damage caused by a handling mishap would have an extremely severe impact on program cost and schedule. This paper will describe the RCM analysis of a newly installed bridge crane at the LMSSC site in Sunnyvale, California and the resulting improvements to the preventative maintenance program for critical hardware cranes throughout the company. AMS Associates was contracted to facilitate this study using their RCM Worksaver software. Lockheed Martin hired a consultant in 2005 to assess the risks to personnel and products associated with critical crane lifts. The resulting report focused on three main areas for improvement; crane use practices, operator skills training and crane suitability and reliability. The first two issues have been addressed by a restructuring of the LMSSC crane operator training program. Three levels of operator training have been created. A Level I operator can only lift non critical loads. A Level III operator is trained to be part of a team executing step by step written critical lift procedures led by a lift director. A Crane Operations Review Team was formed to implement the consultant’s recommendations. The CORT team evolved into a company wide Crane Risk Reduction Department dedicated to improving crane operations. The study of the suitability and reliability of these cranes has focused on achieving consistent configuration control throughout the lifetime of each crane with proper design, maintenance and documentation. The CORT team developed a design standard for critical cranes that incorporates many enhanced safety features developed for the nuclear and aerospace industries. Fail-safe and redundant components have been added to prevent dropping the load in a catastrophic failure in the load bearing systems. Each one of these added devices introduces the risk of downtime if they are not properly maintained. An analysis of the existing crane maintenance practices showed that these critical cranes were not maintained differently from non-critical cranes. The enhanced safety features and their control systems were not addressed in the generic PM checklist. It was decided to take a recently installed crane with many of the features of the new design standard and perform a pilot study using the Reliability Centered Maintenance method to tailor a PM program specific to critical lift cranes. The Crane RCM Program Historically, the 120 critical cranes throughout the Space Systems Company developed their PM tasks via an evolution of experience with some inputs from the OEMs. However, management of the Crane Risk Reduction Department recognized a need to upgrade the crane design standard and also to initiate a formal process to revisit and upgrade the crane PM program. The Classical RCM process had been previously used in a recent SSC project with a critical milling machine. The RCM process was selected here based on the successful experience and results with that machine and other industrial applications. The Classical RCM process is so named because it follows and conforms to the original methodology developed for the 747-100 airplane. It is a 9-Step process (see Figure 1) where the four fundamental principles of RCM are addressed in Steps 4, 5, 6 and 7. A detailed SSC Critical Crane RCM Pilot Project RCM Implementation Process - 9 Steps 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. System Selection and Information Collection System Boundary Definition System Description and Functional Block Diagram System Functions and Functional Failures Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) Logic (Decision) Tree Analysis (LTA) Task Selection Task Packaging Measurement and Update (“Living Program”) Note: Steps 1-7 are usually defined as “The RCM Systems Analysis Process” Figure 1 - RCM Implementation Process 18 april/may 2008
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