Managing an effective maintenance program is essential for any business, but when your facility contains complex equipment vital to your operation, you can't wait for problems to arrive; you need to pre-empt them and solve them beforehand.
Preventative and predictive maintenance programs may sound like similar concepts, but each has a designated role in keeping your machinery in its best condition, and it's important to know what those roles are.
What Is Preventative Maintenance?
Preventative maintenance attempts to prevent any problems with your machinery before they occur. When choosing this program, facility managers must schedule repeated checks and repairs on all their assets. Whilst this does have the immediate improvement of being proactive, it is a challenging program to optimise for efficiency.
This maintenance could also be referred to as a health check-up for your equipment. At regular, planned times, you'll shut down and assess the state of your machine. This will include checking components and replacing any that show signs of wear. Creating a preventative maintenance program will require you to balance how frequently you want to conduct it. The more frequent the checks, the better condition your equipment will be, but additionally, it means more productivity is lost. This balance is an important decision, as the increased time between checks will risk damage to your machinery and potentially the breakdown you've been trying to avoid.
Thermal imaging surveys are an excellent tool for conducting these proactive health checks. They can quickly provide visual data on your machinery and equipment status through detailed thermal images. Understanding how thermal imaging helps preventative maintenance could be an essential asset to the efficiency of your business.
Estimating when to plan your preventative maintenance may seem like guesswork, but you can significantly improve the effectiveness of this plan when combining it with predictive maintenance.
What Is Predictive Maintenance?
Predictive maintenance is one of the essential tools for any manager when running a commercial or industrial facility. It is a technique that collects valuable data that is then analysed for anomalies compared to a pre-determined baseline. By comparing this stored data with real-time updates, you can anticipate any potential problems before they occur.
This has several benefits for any site that relies on specific machinery. An unplanned shutdown will not only incur a costly emergency repair as you try to get it working again, but it will also deny you your usual daily productivity as you wait. Additionally, an unexpected shutdown means some part of your machinery has had a critical failure. This type of accident could have unpredictable consequences that could put your team in harm's way.
Benefits of Predictive Maintenance
With a proper predictive maintenance program in place, you can optimise the efficiency of your current maintenance and create a lean plan that ensures the productivity of your vital equipment. In addition, you can minimise the time the equipment needs for maintenance thanks to the data provided by predictive maintenance. This will not only save you significant time by limiting the production hours lost, but you can also limit the cost of the required spare parts by planning and only storing what you know you'll need.
Studies on predictive maintenance programs have been shown to produce 8% to 12% savings with a massive decrease in maintenance and downtimes and a 75% decrease in breakdowns.
Predictive maintenance focuses on continuously monitoring a machine's health without interrupting its working conditions. This concept is ideally suited to thermal imaging cameras' role in your maintenance programs.
How Do Thermal Cameras Help?
Thermal imaging cameras can provide the user with a wealth of thermographic data on their surroundings. This can help an engineer assess the status of electrics and machinery in a broad range of industries.
Thermal inspection surveys are non-invasive scans that can visually identify areas giving off excess heat. This abundance of unexpected heat can mean many things, but always, it's a sign of a defect. The most common reason is an overheating component, but it can also be a sign of friction between two objects. A lack of heat is also a sign of a problem that needs addressing; just as a part can overheat, an electrical component that is not functioning will be much cooler than usual.
Adding a thermal camera to your pre-established condition maintenance plan is the way to get the most out of your predictive maintenance program. Depending on your facility, you could choose to have one of our accredited engineers regularly conduct a thorough thermographic survey of your site and report the findings. Alternatively, installing a permanent thermal camera onsite configured for automated inspections will provide the 100% coverage that can help you create a water-tight predictive maintenance program.
At Thermascan, we have had a lot of success providing many different industries with high-quality, onsite thermal imaging surveys. Our team of level two certified engineers can be assigned to conduct a thorough thermographic study of your worksite. This can be a one-off or planned as a recurring service, perfect for incorporating into your predictive maintenance program.
Discover more about our high-end thermal imaging cameras for hire or sale and what they could reveal to you online.