“Time-based maintenance strategies cannot guarantee that a particular part will not fail before its allotted time.”

Traditional reactive and time-based approaches to electrification equipment maintenance are becoming increasingly outmoded in the digital age. ABB’s Lee Todd, Head of Energy & Carbon for ABB Electrification Services explains how new approaches to equipment maintenance can provide greater resilience and equipment lifetime.

Everything ultimately comes back to reliability. You can have the most efficient machines, and the most productive processes, but if those machines and processes – as well as the electrification infrastructure underpinning them – are not running, then all that technology and ingenuity counts for nothing. Similarly, if keeping those processes running requires vast amounts of resources and close human supervision to ensure that processes are optimised and running as they should, then that is inherently inefficient.

Then there’s the cost of downtime itself. Halting a chemical, pharmaceutical or other industrial process due to sudden electrical failure means an immediate loss in revenues. However, the cost of downtime is never just output lost multiplied by time. If deadlines slip or orders are left unfulfilled then there may be commercial penalties incurred as well as reputational costs. The time spent by maintenance engineers diagnosing issues, or finding, purchasing, fitting and testing replacement parts and equipment can also very quickly add up.

There may be other potential penalties to consider; if an equipment failure causes a fire or a leak of a hazardous substance then this may incur environmental penalties, and require additional time to inspect and remedy before production can resume. The cost of a serious cybersecurity breach is almost incalculable, but this too can be a knock-on effect of an outage to critical electrification systems.

Where reactive maintenance falls short

Without wishing to scaremonger, the point here is that the stakes are high. Modern electrification systems are incredibly complex, and the effects of a seemingly minor fault in one component or system can manifest elsewhere in the same system or in other related systems. With a purely reactive approach, even a highly experienced maintenance engineer or plant operations manager may have little or no prior warning that critical electrical components are about to fail, putting system reliability and uptime at risk. The first sign of an impending problem may be a tripped circuit breaker, but this in isolation reveals next to nothing about the underlying cause as to why it tripped. Reclosing the breaker may allow production to resume in the immediate term. But it won’t fix the underlying cause, and may trigger a more serious and more widespread outage next time.

This highlights the intrinsic problems associated with traditional electrical maintenance strategies. Routine equipment inspections are typically conducted at periodic intervals, typically accompanied by the prescriptive replacement of equipment or individual components according to a specified timetable. This regime assumes a mean time between failure for components that is consistent and predictable. However, the real world does not always work to a pre-arranged schedule. Failure rates of devices can vary wildly depending on the environment in which the equipment operates, as well as how well-maintained it is throughout its lifetime; both of which directly impact system reliability.

Reflecting the increasing scale and sophistication of modern plant operations, the limits of time-based and reactive maintenance schedules are amplified further as electrical systems become larger and more complex. The wider trend towards digitalisation offers helpful solutions in simplifying the monitoring of equipment. However, digitalisation itself also creates additional challenges, among them the need for constant uptime and reliable performance across interconnected systems. Indeed, equipment monitoring systems must perform without interruption to avoid the risk of losing precious insights collected from instrumentation and control systems about process and plant performance.

Having to do more with less

In common with many engineering-led industry sectors, an increasing skills shortage is making it harder to identify and retain suitably skilled personnel. Tens of thousands of veteran electrical systems experts are retiring, taking with them decades of practical experience and deep knowledge of highly specialised electrical systems found in factories, power plants and other industrial facilities. This pool of expertise is leaving the industry faster than it’s being replaced, leaving employers across many industries struggling to fill a yawning talent gap. Without this in-depth knowledge of complex electrical systems and their interactions with wider plant operations, a younger generation of newly-qualified can struggle with the challenges of optimising and maintaining legacy electrical systems that may have been originally specified and installed before they were born.

In-house engineering and maintenance staff can also struggle with the rapid pace of electrification technology. Components, working practices and regulations are constantly evolving, with the result that specialist knowledge about complex systems can become quickly outdated. This is notably with the case with traditional reactive maintenance that’s heavily reliant on scheduled manual inspections. Staff often rely on their ‘gut instinct’ – honed with years or decades of practical experience and training – to make an accurate diagnosis and prescribe the most effective course of action. And if an unscheduled outage does occur at any time, the costs of lost production can mount quickly while locating a suitably qualified expert to attend site, delaying recovery and compromising reliability.

Time-based maintenance strategies cannot guarantee that a particular part will not fail before its allotted time. Equally, they can be an expensive and sometimes ineffective use of company resources. Replacing an aging component that is still in perfectly usable condition, regardless of its stated working life, is a form of waste. It is costly in terms of resources and human capital, tying up operations and maintenance staff on an unneeded swap-out while consigning a fully functioning part to landfill, months or years before its allotted time. Furthermore, scheduled maintenance often brings productivity to a standstill for hours or days, biting into revenues and profitability that most businesses can ill afford. If certain maintenance activities could, with the benefit of hindsight, have been postponed or scaled back, then this could potentially free up resources without affecting operational integrity.

Of course, having the hindsight to know exactly what maintenance tasks are required at any given time was in the past easier said than done and almost impossible using conventional reactive and time-based approaches. Today, adopting a proactive approach to reliability and maintenance of electrical equipment is now within the reach and resources of any organisation, of any size, anywhere in the world.

Predictive and proactive strategies

Digitalisation, when deployed intelligently, can provide that hindsight. Real-time condition monitoring, combined with advances in trend analysis, and new developments in non-invasive diagnostics and maintenance, can detect the warning signs of failures long before they develop into faults.

This changing operational landscape opens up new possibilities for industrial organisations to take a more holistic view of plant operations. ABB’s suite of electrification reliability solutions, provided through ABB Navigate, helps to guide organisations in the transition from reactive to proactive and predictive maintenance, laying the pathway for smarter, more resilient, more reliable operations, underpinned by data-driven decision-making.

Through a consultative approach, ABB enables organisations to optimise the maintenance and management of complex electrical systems. With the provision of technical expertise and advisory services, this consultative approach frees up businesses to look at reliability, not just as an objective in itself, but also through the wider lens of profitability, ROI, resource and asset management, and net zero ambitions.

The first step towards a more resilient operation is to take ABB’s Reliability Assessment Survey. This takes just a few minutes, and involves answering some simple questions about your organisation, operations, and maintenance strategies. The survey will then instantly provide a bespoke report analysing the resilience of operations, highlighting what your organisation is doing right, and any gaps that may require attention, as well as next steps in how they can be addressed.

For more information and to take the survey, visit:

abb.com