Predictive Maintenance 4.0

Strategy to improve the service life of machines

Predictive maintenance

In hydraulic and lubrication oil systems, friction, wear, leakage and excess temperatures can contribute to contaminating the operating fluid with solid particle contamination or water. This contamination is a serious problem for the system. It will cause system downtime by creating errors in components and subsystems.

In order to prevent loss in term of time and money, the condition monitoring of the operating fluid is primordial. Implementing a predictive maintenance 4.0 strategy is the best solution for the service life of all critical machine elements. We will fully use them, by detecting a variation from the fluid’s normal condition early on. Indeed, as soon as we detect the beginnings of a variation, we can estimate the remaining service life of the corresponding parameter. Therefore, we can use it for ongoing production in a controlled manner.

This predictive maintenance 4.0 will allow us to use the existing components optimally. It will also allow a proper plan of their replacements with new spare parts. This will reduce the total costs for the machinery throughout its service life.

The three pillars of the predictive maintenance 4.0 principle are:

Permanently monitoring the condition of a “healthy” system to detect wear or variations from the normal condition early on;
If we detect a variation, we usually issue an alert in the simplest case. But a better option is to determine and output the remaining service life of a component or a subsystem;
On the basis of this “condition” of the system, we can now reliably avoid costly downtime and schedule inexpensive maintenance.

Industry 4.0 is the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies.

Learn more about the Industry 4.0 and Predictive Maintenance 4.0 trend