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Every device has a point of failure.
What does that mean?
Well, a new device fresh from the manufacturer
is healthy and problem-free.
Due to wear and tear on the device as it ages,
its health slowly deteriorates and eventually it fails.
At this point,
you need to perform maintenance for the device
to get it back to a healthy condition.
Now, based on this simple chart,
there are three main types of maintenance:
Reactive,
preventive,
and predictive.
With reactive maintenance,
you simply wait until a device breaks down
and then perform maintenance on that device.
That means that you wait until the device fails
and requires maintenance and then react,
hence reactive maintenance.
For example,
let’s say that you have a microwave oven at home.
You use it for a few years until it gets to the point of failure
and It won’t turn on anymore.
In this case,
you repair the microwave
or buy a new one.
But it may take a couple of days for you to either repair the microwave
or buy a new one.
That means,
with this wait and react way of maintenance,
you may not be able to use your microwave for a couple of days
which is not a big deal.
However, if the same thing happens in a big industrial enterprise
like an oil refinery,
there might be huge consequences.
For example,
if you wait for a pressure transmitter to fail
and then perform maintenance on it,
there might be considerable financial losses.
This is because every minute of interruptions
in the manufacturing process
may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more.
So the wait and react or reactive maintenance
may work fine for your microwave oven
but it is probably not the best choice for industrial processes.
So what is the solution?
The solution is to use preventive maintenance.
With preventive maintenance, you try to perform maintenance for the device
long before the device gets to the point of failure.
For example,
you can check the pressure transmitter regularly
and before it gets to the point of failure
to make sure that there won’t be any sudden interruption
to the industrial process.
However, this is not very cost-effective.
“Why,” you ask?
Because by performing the maintenance early,
you waste device life that is still usable.
This is the time that we could still use the device
without any maintenance
but now we’re losing that because of early preventing maintenance.
This is where predictive maintenance can help.
As the name suggests,
with predictive maintenance,
you predict when the device fails
and schedule maintenance just before that.
Following this process,
you minimize the device or machine downtime
and maximize its lifetime.
So with preventive maintenance,
you solve the downtime issue
and prevent it from happening
but you lose on device lifetime,
meaning the time you could use the device without any issue.
However, with predictive maintenance
not only can you solve the device downtime issue,
but there will also be little to no wasted device lifetime.
This is cool, right?
It’s like you’re cheating :)
You know when the device might fail,
you wait and play it cool,
and then right before the device fails
you perform maintenance on it.
Now you may ask
how we are doing this?
How can we predict when a device fails?
Well, this is simply done using the previous data
that we have collected from a similar device in the past.
For instance,
with the pressure transmitter example,
there are already thousands if not millions of similar devices installed
all over the world from the same brand.
By analyzing the available data from these current devices,
we can pretty accurately predict when a similar device fails.
The fancy term that we currently use or maybe overuse
for utilizing this data
is AI or Artificial Intelligence.
But, the basic principle comes down to
analyzing historic and current data
and making “intelligent” decisions for the future.
One of these intelligent or smart decisions that we can make
is to predict when a similar new device will fail in the future
and perform maintenance right before that,
hence predictive maintenance!
Now, at the time of posting this video,
we’re still at the beginning phases of this whole predictive maintenance stuff.
You may argue that this will never work
as accurately as it sounds on paper
or it is very expensive to implement
and YOU MAY BE RIGHT MY Friend.
With all the recent years’ advancements,
we, I mean people in industry,
are still in the learning and adaptation phase of predictive maintenance
so it may take a few years or maybe a couple of decades
for us to properly transition from preventive maintenance
to predictive maintenance
but, hey, we’re getting there.
It may be off the topic here but
as I’m working on this video
I had some interesting thoughts that I’d like to share with you.
What if we could apply this whole concept of predictive maintenance
to human body organs?
I mean what if we could replace a heart
before it fails for example?
Could we then live forever?
What if aging is a disease?
Consider how the world would change if we could live forever?
The plan that Elon Musk and SpaceX have started
for making humans multi-planetary
seems in line with living a considerably longer life.
Let me know in the comments below what you think of this.
Ok enough of crazy futuristic ideas.
Let’s get back to the present time.
In summary, we have three types of maintenance.
Reactive,
preventive,
and predictive.
Reactive maintenance is when you wait until the device fails
and then you fix it.
This causes your production line to stop
and results in financial losses.
To prevent this,
you can use preventive maintenance.
This is when you perform regular checks and maintenance
before the device fails.
But the challenge with preventive maintenance
is, by performing the maintenance early,
you waste device life that is still useable.
With predictive maintenance, however,
you can predict when the device fails
and schedule maintenance right before that.
By doing this
you can minimize the device or machine downtime
and maximize the lifetime.
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