RELIABILITY WIRE by www.reliabilitydirect.com 

"Your One Stop Shop for Condition Monitoring"

Vibration, Balancing, Alignment, Ultrasound, Oil Analysis & more...

Volume 4, Issue # 10 – November, 2003

In this Issue: 

New Products: Hundreds of Products on our New Hazardous Area Website: www.hazardousareadirect.com

Ask The Expert:  The RCM Trap by Christer Idhammar, Idocom, Inc.

What's Hot:  6 Seriously Cool Tools under $1000.00!

Recommended Book:  Machinery Process Equipment Maintenance and Repair (Practical Machinery Management for Process Plants, Vol. 4) by Heinz P. Bloch

Contest Winner:  Jim Tonti - Harris GCSD

New Products:  Over 2,000 products in the On-Line Catalogs

(www.reliabilitydirect.com and www.hazardousareadirect.com)

Introducing our latest e-commerce site and technical information portal for Hazardous Areas: www.hazardousareadirect.com. The site is being designed for plant engineers and maintenance personnel to locate information on hazardous area requirements and certifications, as well as be a one stop shop for instrumentation and equipment that is certified as approved for use in hazardous locations. The site is under construction, but all products indicated on the website are available and for sale. If you have questions regarding a product or would like to place an order, please call us at 1-800-899-2241 or 1-281-334-0766.

Ask The Expert: The RCM Trap by CHRISTER IDHAMMAR is president and CEO of IDCON Inc., www.idcon.com

USING RCM WISELY. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) has its place, but many times plants jump into training programs and attempt to implement this concept long before they are ready for it. The academia of maintenance still argue about the definition of RCM. Some even say that if it is not done exactly the way they prescribe, then it is not RCM. So what? The whole idea is that you want to achieve more cost-effective reliability through the implementation of better operations and maintenance practices.

RCM has its definite place in the specification and design phase of new equipment and systems, and for existing critical and complicated systems. The thought process used, for example, to analyze existing preventive programs, is good, but can easily be made overcomplicated to serve the purpose. I have analyzed the results of many RCM implementations, and the fact is that after a very lengthy criticality and failure mode analysis, the end results have not changed the fact that a V-belt drive needs to be inspected for an obviously critical belt conveyor! What is often missing is a document describing how to inspect it while the equipment is operating. In the worst cases, belts, couplings, heat exchangers, control valves, and other common components are, even after the RCM analyses, inspected during shutdowns. Perhaps some inspections have been deleted because equipment was not critical. So, there you might have saved an inspection that only takes two minutes for an operator who will inspect the process in that area every shift anyway!

I suggest that before you enter into RCM you do the following:

• Do your maintenance prevention well
• Do your basic inspections well
• Do your predictive maintenance well

The first two of the above activities are low cost and easy to implement because of high acceptance by people in your organization. You can use standard training material to train people when and how to do inspections. What you do with, for example, a coupling, can be decided without a complicated analysis. The failure developing period for misalignment might be two to eight weeks, so you need to inspect it every week on the run using an infrared thermometer. How to do this is described in a Condition Monitoring Standard for each common component.

KNOWING THE BASICS. The time to implement is short; a production area can have all inspections documented, people trained, and inspections executed in less than four weeks. An RCM approach and implementation could take six months with no different result. An RCM analysis might lead you to spend days deciding that the primary screen is critical, and that if the bearings fail the screen goes down; therefore, you need to inspect the bearings—all of which is obvious.

RCM does not consider planning and scheduling and people efficiency at all, nor does it include vital support systems such as a technical database and its interface with stores. RCM is therefore a tool that should be used selectively for critical and very complicated systems and equipment. It is not a complete reliability and maintenance system. Do not fall into the trap of believing it is something completely new and different, or that it is a complete program for reliability and maintenance. I know plants that have spent over three years on RCM implementation and they still do not have the basics in place and/or executed well. It cannot be reinforced often enough to do the basics well before you start complicating things.

What's Hot: 6 Seriously Cool Tools under $1000.00!

• The hand-held TMEH 1 Oil Analyzer provides accurate feedback on oil condition in just two minutes. It detects mechanical wear and any loss of lubricating properties in the oil with a repeat accuracy less than 5%. These results in turn provide an indication of the loss of lubricating properties of the oil and also of and mechanical wear in the equipment in which the oil is used. Price reduced to only $995.00!

• The L-80 Powerline Laser Belt Alignment system clearly shows  parallel and and angular pulley misalignment. Minimize excessive vibration and premature belt wear - price now reduced to only $975.00!

• The CMVP40/50 Vibration Pen Plus operates with the press of a button, measuring vibration according to ISO standards and utilizing acceleration enveloping technology to identify a range of bearing, gear mesh and other machinery problems - only $945.00!

• The ST80-IS is an Intrinsically Safe Infrared Thermometer with 8-point circular laser, high/low alarm, MAX, MIN, DIF, and AVG temperature settings, and a temperature range of -32 to 600°C (-25 to 1100°F). It also has adjustable emissivity, and a D : S ratio of 
  30 : 1. Just $649.00!

•  The EXT-381275 is a Graphical Storage Oscilloscope and True RMS MultiMeter - Includes RS-232 Interface and PC Software for only $329.00!

• The EXT-450 is an Autoranging Multimeter with non-contact IR Thermometer with Laser Pointer - this combination tool is now only $99.00!

Recommended Book: This month's 5 Star Recommendation:  Machinery Process Equipment Maintenance and Repair (Practical Machinery Management for Process Plants, Vol. 4) by Heinz Bloch

This updated edition is an invaluable source of practical cost-effective maintenance, repair, installation, and field verification procedures for machinery engineers. It is filled with step-by-step instructions and quick-reference checklists that describe preventive and predictive maintenance for major process units such as vertical, horizontal, reciprocating, and liquid ring vacuum pumps, fans and blowers, compressors, turbo expanders, turbines, and more. Also included are sections on machinery protection, storage, lubrication, and periodic monitoring.

Contest Winner:  Jim Tonti - Harris GCSD

October Question: The TMEH 1 is a comparative instrument, which enables optimized intervals to be maintained between oil changes. It detects and measures the dielectric constant in a used oil sample, which is compared against results taken from an unused lubricant of the same type and brand.

November Question: The NAT-VB-1000B Portable Balancer Analyzer performs single and dual plane balance calculations and the ISO_____ standard is built into the firmware.

Prize:  Raytek MT4 MiniTemp Infrared Thermometer AND the new Reliability Direct Ball Cap!

Send your answer to dgallagher@reliabilitydirect.com  subject: November Question.

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