Reliable Plant September 2005

If you can’t stand the heat, you better not seek employment at the Alcoa Primary Metals facility in southern Indiana. Fire-breathing potlines and...

Don your Tim Allen “tool guy” persona and imagine a cordless tool that lasts up to twice as long between charges and has the power of corded tools. How about a cordless tool that performs like a...

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his native Italy. He observed that 20 percent of the people owned 80...

Bearing failure is one of the foremost causes of breakdowns in rotating machinery and such failure can be catastrophic, resulting in costly downtime. One of the key issues in bearing prognostics is...

The term reliability was discussed in my last column. I argued that maintenance should be responsible primarily for “equipment reliability” and work in a close partnership with operations, whose...

A primary reason that planning fails is that planners do not plan! They do not have time to plan because they are in the wrong time zone. Figure 1 shows the cycle of maintenance...

It never ceases to amaze me that no matter what industry you are in or how big or small of a company you work for, success is dependent on the ability to find, attract, hire, manage, develop and...

In the Reliability Forum department of Reliable Plant magazine, suppliers provide their insights to a question posed by editor Paul V. Arnold. This issue, the question went out to manufacturers of...

Electricity is nature’s most versatile form of energy. Electrical power lights our homes, streets, offices and factories. The power of electricity can be dangerous if it’s not used correctly....