Definitions
In the Overview of Maintenance Practice chapter, the concept of Pro-Active maintenance was introduced. Pro-active maintenance can be defined as an extension of predictive maintenance to include the determination of the reasons that machines break down. While it is important and economically viable to detect early stages of machine faults and to correct them before they lead to a machine failure, simply replacing the offending part such as a bearing, while it will correct the immediate problem and allow the machine to continue in service, does not address the condition that led to the bearing failure in the first place.
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Determine what machine components are responsible for the problem.
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Determine the cause of the detected machine fault.
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Take appropriate steps to eliminate the identified cause of the problem. One example of this would be to do a precision alignment on a machine which is prone to bearing failures because of excessive radial loading.
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Examine and analyze other machines of the same type, and perform the same preventive tasks on them if appropriate.
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Re-design the machine installation or the machine itself to eliminate the possibility of the same problem occurring later. In other words, design the problem out of the machine.
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