A reliability centred maintenance approach for assessing the impact of maintenance for availability improvement of carding machine

Abstract

The complex nature of modern equipment and systems often leads to failures and, as a consequence, an increase in machine downtime, thus affecting production. The failures of machines cause disruptions in production, resulting in the loss of availability of the system and increase the cost of maintenance. This paper presents a reliability centred maintenance (RCM) methodology to improve the availability of carding machine in textile industry. The main objective of this paper is to present a RCM approach for improving the availability of the carding machine and thus maximise the production output. Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is used for analysing the failures in the machine. The preventive measure to reduce the failure frequency and its impact are proposed. The proposed preventive measures result in reduction of about 26% of the total downtime and availability improvement of approximately 1.7%, as compared with the availability due to current maintenance practices.