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Machinery & Equipment MRO
September 2021
HOW TO IMPROVE LONG-TERM RELIABILITY OF HEAVY EQUIPMENT BY BRYAN CHRISTIANSEN
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athematically speaking, reliability is a statistical term that indicates the probability of failure-free operation of any equipment in a given operating condition over its lifetime. Within any industry, equipment of various capacities and complexities could be present. While some of the equipment can be small and inexpensive, the others can be heavy and complex, requiring periodic intervention to sustain its performance. Therefore, to optimize the reliability of
such heavy equipment, it is crucial that long-term planning is being carried out, which addresses the reliability over their entire life cycle.
Considerations for long-term reliability planning Long-term planning for heavy equipment would involve careful analysis of different factors that can impact the operational effectiveness of the equipment. The factors would not just be reliability, but other parameters tied closely to it as well, such
as maintainability, availability, and safety. Effective long-term reliability planning is indeed a life cycle planning that balances the cost of reliability improvement measures against the achievable benefits over the equipment life cycle. For example, it would be effective to simply replace inexpensive and non-critical equipment upon failure rather than investing excessive manhours to repair them. On the other hand, it may be worthwhile to implement proactive maintenance regimes for heavy equipment or even improve their design that enhances the reliability of future products. This is because the failure consequences associated with the heavy equipment significantly outweigh the cost of their reliability improvement measures. Following are some of the methods that can be adopted by any industry to perform long-term reliability planning: 1. Adopting design for reliability (DfR) practices The DfR is the selection of parts and the application of engineering design in such a way that reliability targets can be achieved even under worst-case operating conditions. It is a structured process to identify all possible sorts of reliability issues during the design phase and find-
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