Philosophies of Maintenance

It is needless to mention the importance of higher powers and speeds of machinery, utilization of complex process and equipment and desirability of minimum downtime and penalty costs, when industries all over world have entered the era of high technology maintenance management. Particularly, these are practically true in areas with high volume oil production offshore drilling, mass rapid transport, mining and geotechnical applications, power plants and other continuous process industries. Downtime in many of these industries causes enormous losses in earnings.

A way of reducing plant breakdowns is to select the best maintenance strategy. The evolution and the significance of all these philosophies/strategies in general and Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) in particular are discussed in this unit.

• Failure Based Maintenance
• Time Based Maintenance
• Reliability Centered Maintenance
• Condition Based Maintenance
• Total Productive Maintenance