Funding entity Molinos del Ebro
Currently, an important part of the invested capital in industry is due to equipment and installations maintenance because of the significant repercussions on not only reparation and maintenance costs but also on company productivity, profitability and response to market demands. For that reason, an adequate maintenance planning is a fundamental factor for almost every industrial company.
This thesis aspires to establish a set of methods for allowing the integration of the different activities involved in predictive maintenance planning. This idea is new and innovative nowadays because up to now these predictive maintenance activities have been studied and applied separately and not as being part of an integrated planning.
From this viewpoint, each one of these maintenance activities takes into account results and information given by others. These activities are related to:
· Collection of relevant data for estimating equipment health condition
· Continuous processing and analysis of the information collected in order to detect if any symptom of degradation or anomaly is present or could become present.
· Diagnosis of the root causes of the symptoms detected
· Maintenance planning according to machine health condition and its environment and the diagnoses detected. This refers to the dynamical adaptation of the maintenance intervals taking into account the equipment actual need for service.
For doing this maintenance planning, the information considered is not only restricted to recent health condition and fault diagnoses (as do current legacy predictive systems) but also this recent information is combined with history information to obtain a more precise estimation of equipment failure time and thus a decision criteria for the best maintenance strategy to apply.
This proposed maintenance planning considers technical criteria (based on equipment health condition and failure diagnosis) as well as economical and opportunity criteria. Thus, the goal pursued by this predictive maintenance planning is to get the best compromise between availability and reliability and cost.
This thesis contains another important goal that is to measure the efficiency of the applied maintenance. Currently, there are just a few studies about efficiency measurement and almost none in predictive maintenance planning, although it's very convenient and beneficial to be able to evaluate in a quantitative or a qualitative way the effect of maintenance tasks in equipment health condition.
TESIS_MCRUZ
