Fault reporting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fault reporting is a maintenance concept that increases operational availability and that reduces operating cost by three mechanisms:
- Reduce labor-intensive diagnostic evaluation
- Eliminate diagnostic testing down-time
- Provide notification to management for degraded operation
That is a prerequisite for condition-based maintenance.[1]
Active redundancy can be integrated with fault reporting to reduce the down time to a few minutes per year.
Formal maintenance philosophies are required by organizations whose primary responsibility is to ensure systems are ready when expected, such as space agencies and military.[2]
Labor-intensive planned maintenance began during the rise of the Industrial Revolution and depends upon periodic diagnostic evaluation based upon calendar dates, distance, or use. The intent is to accomplish diagnostic evaluations that indicate when maintenance is required to prevent inconvenience and safety issues that will occur when critical equipment failures occur during use.
The electronic revolution allowed inexpensive sensors and controls to be integrated into most equipment. That includes diagnostic indicators, fluid sensors, temperature sensors, ignition sensors, exhaust monitoring, voltage sensors, and similar monitoring equipment that indicates when maintenance is required. Sensor displays are often located in inaccessible locations that cannot be observed during normal operation. Labor-intensive periodic maintenance is often required to inspect indicators.
Some organizations have eliminated most labor-intensive periodic maintenance and diagnostic down time by implementing designs that bring all sensor status to fault indicators near users.
Principle
Maintenance requires three actions.
- Fault discovery
- Fault isolation
- Fault recovery
Fault discovery requires diagnostic maintenance, which requires system down time and labor costs.
Down time and cost requirements associated with diagnostics are eliminated for every item that satisfies the following criteria.
- Automated diagnostic
- Instrumented for remote viewing
- Displayed in the viscidity of supervisory personnel
