The environment in which Ships operate is extremely hostile and failures can be catastrophic or at the very least expensive to resolve. As condition of equipment operating in this hostile environment is not known it is very difficult to develop a condition maintenance plan.
Maintenance must therefore ‘err’ very much on the side of caution. It may therefore be more expensive than it need be, the lack of knowledge of the condition of the equipment leaves ship maintainers and operators exposed to failures in service.
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PCMS’s strategy is to develop new methods aimed at improving maintenance performance and reducing cost through the integrated application of technology and process, to support the application of predictive maintenance techniques ( also referred to as condition based maintenance ).
Our approach relies on a suite of tools and technologies which include condition monitoring – on line and portable, remote diagnostics, maintenance management work planning and control systems, and specialist support services.
Many of these tools have been developed with specialist technology partners, each an expert in a particular field. Together these tools make up the PCMS i-maintenance Service – intelligent maintenance.
PCMS’s approach to the application of predictive maintenance can be broken down into three main areas of activity
Planned Tasks - These are the maintenance tasks that have to be carried out on a regular planned basis. Although these tasks are carried out at intervals based on time or hours, many of them are actually dependant on a measurable condition of components. Predictive maintenance aims to match the task intervals to the actual condition of each component as opposed to the average forecast condition of all component, and therefore extracts the optimum life of each component. Of course, it must do this without compromising safety.
Faults and Failures - also referred to as corrective maintenance. These tasks are unplanned, require diagnostics and have to be rectified. Online Stresswave monitoring, which is part of the i-maintenance tool box, provides remote and enhanced diagnostic capability to enable failures to be recognised as early as possible so that the effect on ships reliability and availability can be minimised. It also provides the data that supports the prediction and optimisation of planned tasks, and data for design improvements as well as improved fault management which can prevent potentially catastrophic and costly failure.
Component Condition and Ship Status - A range of condition monitoring technologies and techniques have been developed to collect and analyse critical ship component performance data. These include systems for the measurement of important parameters of gearboxes, refrigeration, switch gear, engines, rotating equipment, bearings, pneumatics and so on. They provide proactive root-cause analysis information, changing the way maintenance activities are conducted and feed the application of predictive maintenance. In addition use of ultrasonic and thermographic analysis is applied across a wide range of sub-systems and components .
In combination the application of all these techniques provide the reasoning and gives the confidence to allow components to be ‘changed on condition’ rather than periodically. It provides the means to reduced whole-life maintenance costs by reducing the dependency on time-resolved maintenance and extending the time period between major and minor overhauls.
Applied to Ship maintenance, predictive maintenance techniques enable existing tasks to be improved or eliminated, or time reduced; and they provide the ability to predict when failures are imminent.
