Online Equipment Focus on Haul Trucks: In It for the Long Haul
The basic information needed to refine your inspection thresholds fall into two general areas:
- Document the condition observed when the decision was made to pursue corrective action; and
- Document the condition found upon disassembly.
These two basic sets of information allow a correlation to be made between what your threshold is indicating and what the condition actually is.
One note on thresholds or limits: Frequently, condition assessments are not simply good or bad, based on one reading or inspection. A trend is the better indicator. Establishing the baseline and then monitoring the trend sets a foundation for making fully informed decisions about if and when to pull equipment from service.
Continuous improvement
The basic purpose of these examples is to identify issues prior to an operational failure, allowing time to plan the corrective action to minimize production impact. Additional areas that may benefit from a simple, but carefully developed, inspection/assessment/action approach include electrical ground fault monitoring, suspension charge status, and bearing vibration. Each type of machinery, in its particular application, will have its own unique opportunities.
Most industries are shifting focus from maintenance to reliability, and most recently, to equipment optimization. The steps outlined in this article, and those that are appropriate for your specific application, are still critical to operational success.
Of course, with an investment in continuous monitoring technology, a maintenance program can be further improved with little to no downtime required for invasive, risk-introducing, maintenance steps. Until your operation is ready for that next step, however, implementation of these existing systems can yield improved equipment availability.
About the Author: Craig Eller is Liebherr’s manager of maintenance and reliability programs and Kevin Gildea, P.E., is the product manager for its T 282 mining trucks.
|
The Evolution of Equipment Maintenance
|
