5

Corrective Maintenance
INTRODUCTION

Although every effort is made to make engineering systems as reliable as possible through design, preventive maintenance, and so on, from time to time they do fail. Consequently, they are repaired to their operational state. Thus, repair or corrective maintenance is an important component of maintenance activity. Corrective maintenance may be dened as the remedial action carried out due to failure or deciencies discovered during preventive maintenance, to repair an equipment/item to its opera13 tional state. Usually, corrective maintenance is an unscheduled maintenance action, basically composed of unpredictable maintenance needs that cannot be preplanned or programmed on the basis of occurrence at a particular time. The action requires urgent attention that must be added, integrated with, or substituted for previously scheduled work items. This incorporates compliance with prompt action eld changes, rectication of deciencies found during equipment/item operation, and performance of repair actions due to incidents or accidents. A substantial part of overall maintenance effort is devoted to corrective maintenance, and over the years many individuals have contributed to the area of corrective maintenance. This chapter presents some important aspects of corrective maintenance.

CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE TYPES

Corrective maintenance may be classied into ve major categories as shown in 1,4 Fig. 5.1. These are: fail-repair, salvage, rebuild, overhaul, and servicing. These categories are described below. 1. Fail-repair: The failed item is restored to its operational state. 2. Salvage: This element of corrective maintenance is concerned with disposal of nonrepairable material and use of salvaged material from nonrepairable equipment/item in the repair, overhaul, or rebuild programs. 3. Rebuild: This is concerned with restoring an item to a standard as close as possible to original state in performance, life expectancy, and appearance. This is achieved through complete disassembly, examination of all components, repair and replacement of worn/unserviceable parts as per original specications and manufacturing tolerances, and reassembly and testing to original production guidelines.

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Salvage

Fail-repair

Overhaul

Corrective maintenance types

Servicing

Rebuild

FIGURE 5.1 Types of corrective maintenance.

4. Overhaul: Restoring an item to its total serviceable state as per maintenance serviceability standards, using the inspect and repair only as appropriate approach. 5. Servicing: Servicing may be needed because of the corrective maintenance action, for example, engine repair can lead to crankcase rell, welding on, etc. Another example could be that the replacement of an air bottle may require system recharging.

CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE STEPS, DOWNTIME COMPONENTS, AND TIME REDUCTION STRATEGIES AT SYSTEM LEVEL
Different authors have laid down different sequential steps for performing corrective maintenance. For example, Reference 2 presents nine steps (as applicable): localize, isolate, adjust, disassemble, repair, interchange, reassemble, align, and checkout. Reference 3 presents seven steps (as applicable): localization, isolation, disassembly, interchange, reassemble, alignment, and checkout. For our purpose, we assume that corrective maintenance is composed of ve 1 major sequential steps, as shown in Fig. 5.2. These steps are: fault recognition, localization, diagnosis, repair, and checkout. The major corrective maintenance downtime components are active repair time, 1,5 administrative and logistic time, and delay time. The active repair time is made up of the following subcomponents: Preparation time Fault location time Spare item obtainment time Fault correction time Adjustment and calibration time Checkout time

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FIGURE 5.2 Corrective maintenance sequential steps.

Reduction in corrective maintenance time is useful to improve maintenance effectiveness. Some strategies for reducing the system-level corrective maintenance time 6 are as follows: Efciency in fault recognition, location, and isolation: Past experience indicates that in electronic equipment, fault isolation and location consume the most time within a corrective maintenance activity. In the case of mechanical items, often the largest contributor is repair time. Factors such as welldesigned fault indicators, good maintenance procedures, well-trained maintenance personnel, and an unambiguous fault isolation capability are helpful in lowering corrective maintenance time. Effective interchangeability: Good physical and functional interchangeability is useful in removing and replacing parts/items, reducing maintenance downtime, and creating a positive impact on spares and inventory needs. Redundancy: This is concerned with designing in redundant parts that can be switched in at the moment of need so the equipment/system continues to operate while the faulty part is being repaired. In this case the overall

2002 CRC Press LLC

maintenance workload may not be reduced, but the equipment/system downtime could be impacted signicantly. Effective accessibility: Often a signicant amount of time is spent accessing the failed part. Proper attention to accessibility during design can help reduce part accessibility time and, in turn, the corrective maintenance time. Human factor considerations: Attention paid to human factors during design in areas such as readability of instructions, size, shape, and weight of components, selection and placement of dials and indicators, size and placement of access, gates, and readability, and information processing aids can help reduce corrective maintenance time signicantly.