DESIGN RELIABILITY AND MAINTENABILITY

LECTURE 5
1.0 DESIGN MAINTENABILITY: MAINTENABILITY NEED AND RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN RELIABILITY AND MAINTENABILITY

There are several factors responsible for the need of product maintenability.Most
common amongst them is high operating and support costs because of failure and
subsequent maintenance.
The main objective of reliability and maintainability are to
a) To assure that the system/equipment manufactured will be in a readiness state
operation when required.
b) Capable of performing its designated functions effectively and
c) Meeting all the required maintenance characteristics during its life time
1.1 RELIABILITY
This is design characteristics that results in durability of a system/equipment to carry
out its designated function under a state condition and time period. It is accomplished
through various actions such as controlling process, selecting optimum engineering
principles, testing, and adequate component sizing.
1.2 CLASSIFICATION OF MAINTENACE POLICY
Maintenance, repair, andoverhaulplaysanimportantroleinsustainingtheoperation of
engineering systems in the private and public sectors. These systems usually
possessthefollowingfeatures: capital intensive, longservicelife, highdowntimecost,
and mission-critical. The goal of maintenance is to proactively replace aging
components to ensurehighsystemreliabilityandavailabilitywithminimumcost
1.3 CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE
At its core, maintenance is to manage, control, and execute the activities that will
reasonably ensure that the desired availability and performance of equipment are
achieved subject to resource or budgetary constraints. Since maintenance
expenditure isoftenviewedas thenecessarypremiumtobepaidfor availability
insurance, ideally all maintenance decisions need to be directed towards the
maximum returns on that investment, such as improved reliability and availability
or a reduced safety risk to human life. Thus maintenance is a risk control activity,
and the expenditure of maintenance on risk management (e.g. condition monitoring,
process control) should be directly related to the reduction of probability and
consequences of failures

Figure7.1classifies the maintenance methods into three categories based on whether

the action is triggered by the time or the system condition:(i)corrective maintenance
(CM),(ii)preventivemaintenanec(PM),and(iii)condition-basedmaintenance(CBM).
Generally speaking, PM is usually triggered by the time (i.e. Age) or usage while
CM and CBM are system health-driven maintenance strategies. CBM differs from
CM in that the replacement actions in CBM are proactively taken prior to the
incipient failure. CM is also known as run-to-failure maintenance (RTFM).
Maintenance and repair actions are applied only if the system or the component
enters the faulty state.
PM is maintenance that is regularly performed on a piece of equipment in order to
lessen the likelihood of failure. The maintenance is scheduled based on a time or
usage trigger. A typical example of an asset with a time-based PM schedule is an
escalator that is serviced every year
CBMisapredictivemaintenancetriggeredbycertainpredefinedmetricsorsignals, such
as vibration or voltage, that indicate the deteriorated system “health” condition. The
state of the component or system is constantly monitored through sensory data in
order to track their level of deterioration. This can be done through the embedded
sensors, built-in self-test (BIST) programs, or more recently the Internet of Things.
For instance, automated test equipment (ATE) is an electronic instrument used for
testing semiconductor wafers and devices.ATEhas a built-in self-diagnostic program
that routinely checks the functionality and
performanceofitselftomakesurethesignalsgeneratedtotestthedevicesmeetthefidelity
criteria. In a power grid system, phasor measure units (PMUs) formareal-timesensor
network that measures the voltage and phase angles of transmission lines using a
common time source for synchronization.
1.4 CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT
CM is considered as the simplest maintenance strategy. Assets are deliberately
allowed to operate until they break down, at which point reactive maintenance is
performed. Since the time-to-failure of systems is random, it is difficult to precisely
predict the
occurrencetimeofeachfailureduringtheservicetime.Toreducetheunexpectedsystemd
owntimeunderCMpolicy, asset management can estimate the expected number of
failures and proactively store sufficient amounts of spare parts for replacement.
This is often done by estimating the system mean time to failure (MTTF) in
conjunction with
thefleetsizeandusagerate.Thefollowingexampleisprovidedtoassisttheestimation of
required spare parts under CM policy
2.0 PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE
PM is a scheduled maintenance policy conducted at predefined time intervals or
system usages (Chitra2003).PM is perhaps the most widely used method for
equipment maintenance in private and public sectors, including manufacturing,
transportation energy, healthcare, and defense industries. PM is best suited for those
systems that have a clear wear-out characteristic, such as degradation signatures or
failure trends (Starr1997).PM actions include inspection, replacement, and overhaul,
and these are made at a predetermined time point to prevent the component from
unexpected failure. To that end, it is necessary to understand the component lifetime
characteristics, such as mean-time-to-failure, and the cost of sudden failures. The
latter happens when the component fails before reaching the predetermined
schedule.