MFPT Newsletter - September 2012 |
Greetings!
Greetings!
Welcome to our MFPT newsletter!
In this edition we cover a range of topics from our Executive Director's recent trip to the UK, through a Yahoo Groups' 'Root Cause' forum, a Virtual Life Management approach, and inspecting for failure precursors, to a compressor failure root cause analysis. Then there's a review of a new SAE IVHM book, an update on MFPT 2013, and a brief highlight on our on-line database of MFPT's 45 years of publications.
Happy reading and as always, I welcome any comments you may have - so please let me, Sonia Vohnout, know by e-mailing me at newsletter@mfpt.org! |
Recent Travels of the Executive Director
By Chris Pomfret
This summer was particularly exciting and intense in terms of condition monitoring and health management activities. By a fortunate coincidence, the annual Condition Monitoring Conference (CM2012/MFPT 2012) organized by Professor Len Gelman from Cranfield University was held in England and the annual COMADEM conference organized by Professor Raj Rao from the University of Birmingham was held the following week, also in England... (read more) |
Planning is moving ahead rapidly for the 2013 MFPT Conference, which is being combined with the International Society of Automation's 59th International Instrumentation Symposium. ISA's IIS has nearly a 60-year history which, combined with MFPT's 45 years, brings a legacy of over 100 years of equipment condition management! It's the HM conference not to miss is 2013... (read more) |
A Retrospective of the Yahoo Groups Root Cause Forum: 12 Years of Thoughtful Inquiry into the Causes of Things that Go Wrong
By Debbie Aliya
It was at my first MFPT Conference back in 1997 that there was a pre-event one day seminar on Root Cause Analysis presented by C. Robert (Bob) Nelms. I thought I knew pretty much what Root Cause Analysis was, but decided to attend to get someone else's perspective. I don't remember too much about the content... (read more) |
By Chris Pomfret
Following SAE International's recent best seller, Integrated Vehicle Health Management: Perspectives on an Emerging Field, the sequel and number 2 in an anticipated trilogy, "Integrated Vehicle Health Management: Business Case Theory and Practice" takes the subject to the next level. The focus is on the justification for the adoption of a new "modus operandi" in asset health management, and its impact on business strategy and servitization of technology... (read more) |
By Bob Tryon
A major commercial airline was suffering from premature failures of an auxiliary power unit (APU) bearing on a continual basis costing $4M annually in replacement & downtime costs over a 4-5 year period. The premature failure began around the same period of time that a new mandated cold start procedure was put in place by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2007... (read more) |
By Marc Pepi and Anindya Ghoshal
It has long been the "Holy Grail" of material state awareness - the idea of being able to detect damage in-situ before it leads to the fatigue crack, composite delamination, etc... i.e., detecting the "precursor" to eventual failure. Problems arise in the fact that these precursors are usually too small for today's equipment to detect... (read more) |
By Abdulla Al-Harbi, Ibrahim Al-Ibrahim, and Gopal Chandra Mazumdar
The medium pressure (MP) gas compressor (a centrifugal BCL608) in the turbocompressor train of the GC-25 Condensate Recovery Unit (CRU) at a Kuwait Oil Company facility (see Figure 1) had shown abnormal vibration and a high trip frequency since its commissioning... (read more) |
By Rick Wade
Following on from the last newsletter, here is another useful feature of the MFPT website you may not know about. The MFPT website hosts a database with a listing of every paper that MFPG/MFPT has ever published in its 45-year history (2012 to be added soon)... (read more) |