Efficient Plant March 2020 - 11

feature | predictive maintenance
is still very much in its early stages and a
state to aspire to in the future.

CREATING THE CONDITIONS
Predictive maintenance is built on a solid
base of condition monitoring. Condition
monitoring uses sensors and field devices
to gather information on machinery and
provide the intelligence to gauge when the
equipment actually needs maintenance,
rather than relying on pre-arranged intervals. It operates in real time, generating
up-to-date information on equipment status
and operations, informed by regular or continuous assessment and anomaly detection.
The sensors and devices employed can
be connected to the plant network and
shared across an enterprise through IIoT
technology. The data generated by sensors
and devices can be hosted in an edge or
cloud environment, which allows them to
be combined with data coming from other
production sites, or with enterprise-wide
historical data, and analyzed for the type
of maintenance that should be performed.
Edge and cloud applications have been
important drivers of predictive maintenance, as they create greater opportunities
to harness, process, and use data obtained
from a wide range of sources.
Across industrial automation, sensors and
detectors have been in use for more than
two decades. It was only when the computing horsepower became available to accelerate data analysis for practical and effective
use, and the IT industry started to understand how to use the required analytics, that
the potential emerged for employing it in
industrial automation. Producers were able
to use increasingly higher volumes of data
on asset conditions to create deeper insight
and better analytics for asset management.

PREDICTIVE POWER
In addition to the more efficient and precise
maintenance schedule it allows, the opera-

MARCH 2020

EP2003fabb.indd 11

While predictive and prescriptive practices
greatly improve operational efficiency,
they have a greater value in advancing
company profitability.

tional benefits that predictive maintenance
delivers to plant operations are a key part
of its appeal. Timely maintenance helps
industrial producers avoid machine failure
and the ensuing costly downtime. Performing maintenance only when necessary also
reduces costs, compared with compulsory
maintenance at fixed intervals.
What's more, compulsory maintenance
can actually induce unnecessary failures
due to human error, such as forgetting a
part when reassembling the equipment, or
failing to properly tighten fasteners. In these
instances, it would have been better not to
touch the equipment at all.
Advanced predictive maintenance can
generate analytics that demonstrate that the
equipment must be maintained to avoid
failure, and also to provide additional information on the probability of failure and on
predicted time to failure. This information
enables even more accurate and effective
maintenance scheduling across the asset
base.
This specific knowledge empowers
producers to schedule shutdowns with
confidence, allowing them to extend times
between maintenance where possible to
maximize uptime.

It also enables them to plan exactly which
maintenance activities to prioritize, and
which to postpone, without risk of failure.
They can group together maintenance
actions and be proactive in addressing
imminent issues, depending on the probability of failure in the foreseeable operational future. This means duration of shutdowns
can also be reduced, providing more calendar time for production.
In addition to the advantages predictive
maintenance delivers to plant operations
and productivity, broader macro-level
factors drive its adoption. Market pressures
contribute to the demand for constantly
higher production availability which, in
turn, requires maximum asset availability.
Timely and targeted maintenance helps
deliver this.
Similarly, pressure to increase margins
forces producers to wring out every last
drop of production capacity while reducing
maintenance and operational expenditures.
Predictive maintenance is an effective way
to achieve this.
Aging assets and slimmer capital budgets
are pushing producers to find new and
more-effective ways to extend asset life.
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Efficient Plant March 2020

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