Chapter 3 - Preventive Maintenance Program

Abstract

The chapter discusses the preventive maintenance program. The preventive maintenance program is developed using a guided logic approach and is task oriented rather than maintenance process oriented. This eliminates the confusion associated with the various interpretations across different industries of terms such as condition monitoring, on-condition, and hard time. By using a task-oriented concept, it is possible to see the whole maintenance program reflected for a given item. The maintenance program consists of two groups of tasks: preventive maintenance tasks and nonscheduled maintenance tasks. The preventive maintenance tasks include failure-finding tasks that are scheduled to be accomplished at specified intervals or based on condition. The objective of these tasks is to identify and prevent deterioration below inherent safety and reliability levels by one or more of the following means: lubrication and servicing, operational, visual, or automated checking. Inspection, functional test, and condition monitoring and restoration are some other means. An effective program schedules only those tasks necessary to meet the stated objectives. It does not schedule additional tasks that increase maintenance costs without a corresponding increase in protection of the inherent level of reliability.