System, heal thyself

Maintenance procedures need a radical overhaul if the UK process industries are to remain competitive. This is according to Andrew Starr, who is professor of maintenance systems at Cranfield University and head of the Through-life Engineering Services Institute.

For Starr, the traditional culture of maintenance has been one of the limiting factors in achieving sustainability, cost and production goals.

“Proper maintenance is worth a great deal of money to the process industries,” he says. “There are still people who think that maintenance for a piece of equipment is something that you do when it’s broken down and that it’s a future problem. This is a very traditional approach and the nature of that culture is something that many industries are struggling with.”

The culture of run-to-failure maintenance means that an organisation will expect the inevitable failure of a piece of equipment and have enough spare parts and manpower to keep the operation running.

The policy has the benefit of simplicity, and is often adopted by companies who lack the budget to implement a different approach. But while the short-term benefits may be attractive, the long-term costs also need to be taken into consideration.

There are still people who think that maintenance for a piece of equipment is something that you do when it’s broken down

Cranfield University professor Andrew Starr

“When you have a maintenance manager and operation manager, they are always at loggerheads because one of them makes money and one of them costs money,” says Starr “For a process industry to work well it has to consider its batch process and in those cases it wants as high an availability as possible. It doesn’t achieve that by ignoring the maintenance. It has to be an integral part of the operation.”

Starr is hoping to see a shift away from maintenance as an isolated activity, towards one that embraces it through the life-cycle of a piece of equipment.

In July 2011, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) set up the Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services which aims to develop technologies and processes for improving design and manufacturing of engineering services while reducing whole life cost of high-value products.

As well as looking at what can be done to improve maintenance operations now, the Centre is attempting to identify self-healing technologies for electronic and mechanical components of the future.

Many large engineering systems already have a level of self-diagnosis, self-repair or self-immobilisation built in to prevent more serious damage. But the move of self-repair from larger systems and machines to individual mechanical and electronic (mechatronic) components is a process that is only just beginning and it could provide huge savings in the process sectors.

“The ideal support strategy for a mechatronic system in need of repair is one that administers the support as required in-situ without the need for human decision or intervention,” states a report by the group.

“This is very much the process by which humans themselves have great resilience in that the micro repair of damage, the process of healing, goes on without intervention unless the damage sustained is severe.”

Up until now, there have been self-sharpening knives and self-repairing bearings from the mechanical world, self-repairing paint from the materials world, and self-fixing memory from the electronics world.

But one particular area that the Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services is planning to look at is how engineers can learn from biological self-repair strategies such as stem cell therapy and how best to implement mechatronic self-healing.

However, Starr warns that technology alone is not a solution to good maintenance.

“We can solve most of the problems we need to in the area of maintenance with some technological solution, but if people aren’t ready for it then it doesn’t solve anything,” he says.

“For example, today we have solved most of the problems associated with sensing [using] telemetry and data storage. The problem today is analysing the data and getting any use from it. It doesn’t help you create value
for a business if all it has done is contrive a cost.”

Starr claims that there needs to be more leadership from top-level management on maintenance to drive the message through an organisation. He added that he has spoken to a number of technical engineers who know that improvements can be made on the ground, but have been unable to get the message that the investment is worth making through to the top-level.

“One of the key things that is important for engineers to do is to express the value of their contribution,” he says.

The challenges presented by maintenance are long-term and need to be viewed as such. The maintenance strategies and technologies that process engineers implement now are likely to have an impact for several decades.

“The future of maintenance will be fewer people and more technology, although the human factor will remain very important,” says Starr. Particularly, he says, when it comes to implementing an integrated approach for future maintenance.