Improving equipment availability through application of condition monitoring techniques

摘要

This paper defines equipment availability and discusses the condition monitoring techniques that are used to optimise equipment availability. With today's shrinking military budgets and the commercial sector's need to provide reliable equipment for business survival, availability of equipment has become a key performance parameter. This mandates 'designing in' availability during the design phase and performing tasks that optimise availability during the operational phase. During the design phase, the systems engineering disciplines of reliability, availability, maintainability and testability (RAM-T) are charged with influencing designs for availability through increasing the equipment's mean time between failure, decreasing its mean time to repair and decreasing its logistics delay time to effect the repair. During the operational phase of the equipment's service-life cycle its availability can be further optimised by monitoring its condition, implementing life extension actions and, when failure is unavoidable, optimising the availability of spares and repair parts that will reduce equipment down time.