Page 16 - Machinery Component Maintenance

Chapter 1
Machinery Maintenance: An

Overview

Maintenance and repair of machinery in a petrochemical process plant
was defined in a preceding volume as simply “defending machinery
equipment against deterioration.” Four strategies within the failure-
fighting role of maintenance were defined:

Preventive
Predictive
Breakdown or demand based
0 “Bad actor” or weak spot management

Machinery maintenance can often be quite costly in a petrochemical
plant operation. Prior to the the publication of the first two volumes of
this series. very few studies were available describing quantitative or ob-
jective methods for arriving at the optimization of the four strategies’.
Though our readers should not expect detailed contributions to those sub-
jects in this volume, we did opt to include an overview section describing
the maintenance philosophy practiced in a large multi-plant corporation
which makes effective use of centralized staff and computerized planning
and tracking methods.
What, then, can our readers expect? After a short definition of the ma-
chinery maintenance problem we will highlight centralized maintenance
planning. We will then guide our readers through the world of machinery
maintenance procedures by identifying the What, When, Where, Why.
How-and sometimes Who-of most maintenance and repair activities
around petrochemical process machinery. We ask. however, that our
readers never lose sight of the total picture. What. then is the total pic-
ture?

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