Condition-based Maintenance - Challenges

Challenges

Despite its usefulness, there are several challenges to the use of CBM. First and most important of all, the initial cost of CBM is high. It requires improved instrumentation of the equipment. Often the cost of sufficient instruments can be quite large, especially on equipment that is already installed. Therefore, it is important for the installer to decide the importance of the investment before adding CBM to all equipment. A result of this cost is that the first generation of CBM in the oil and gas industry has only focused on vibration in heavy rotating equipment .

Secondly, introducing CBM will invoke a major change in how maintenance is performed, and potentially to the whole maintenance organization in a company. Organizational changes are in general difficult.

Also, the technical side of it is not always as simple. Even if some types of equipment can easily be observed by measuring simple values as vibration (displacement or acceleration), temperature or pressure, it is not trivial to turn this measured data into actionable knowledge about health of the equipment.

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