Maintenance and calibration

In order to otpimize costs, the maintenance processes management imposes definite choices for adopting policies and techniques. Main Maintenance methodologies- Preventive Maintenance- Contingent Maintenance- On-Condition or Predictive Maintenance.

 

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive Maintenance is executed according to a predefined programme, through a systematic inspection monitoring. It is clear that the efficacy of this maintenance is proportional to the controls frequency and the components replacements.

Contingent maintenance: sometimes, the bad working of a component produces a serious event, causing the stop of it or other connected equipment. Therefore the Contingent Maintenance involves very high costs, both for default of production and repair of equipment. On-Condition or Predictive Maintenance

The maintenance intervention is executed after having identified the symptoms revealing the possible damage, before that the component reaches the damage limit. These symptoms can derive from inspection interventions, opportunely scheduled through a direct survey of any type of anomaly, such as superheating, vibrations and so on…

All the most advanced maintenance policies, having as main scope the management of systems and equipment for corporate profit, use criteria and models of operational research optimisation and diagnostic methods supported by Non-Destructive Testing.

As for the diagnostic, that is the possibility of assessing the real condition of a system and its components during the survey, it is indispensable to use support instruments that rapidly notice the symptoms of possible anomalies, in order to prevent damages and more onerous costs. Therefore, the acceleration of the diagnostic process is very advantageous for preventing and rapidly repairing the damages, reducing costs in a very evident way.

 

Infrared Thermography: prevailing Solution

The Infrared Thermography plays a leading role and is considered to be the main technique of predictive inspection in the electrical and electromechanical field. In all the industrial applications, the temperature is a very important indicator of the working condition of systems or equipment, but in many cases it is also an indicator of the health status of the system on the whole and/or its parts and components.

The Infrared Thermography, a Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) of visual type, is defined by the UNI 10824-1/2000 regulation as follows:
“method allowing to obtain, through a thermographic instrument, the spatial distribution and the temporal evolution of the infrared radiation emanating from the observed scene, within the thermocamera sensitivity interval.”