Task 1
Why does engineering equipment fail, what happens when it does and what can we do about it?
Equipment’s fails because certain parts of it fail first and that prevents the whole process from working. It is important to understand the problem before any maintenance. There are a lot of reasons it could fail because of the age of the equipment and parts need to be changed or if the equipment vibrates nuts and bolts can be loosen and parts can fall apart. When this happens the machine needs to be stopped and maintained. Age is very important if the machine has been used for a very long time the efficiency and the quality wouldn’t be as good as a new one, a machine has a certain life span for example on a car the timing belt must be replaced after every 50,000 miles. Wear could lead to a fault in a machine because parts come into contact with each other for example a cars break pad. Corrosion in certain materials takes longer than others like aluminium, when a part of a machine corrodes it degrade and can cause failures. Raw materials such as oil and compressed air can run equipment’s. If something different unwanted to the equipment is in it, it can affect the way the machine works. For example water in a petrol tank will cause a car to break down and this is a fouling. Lack of maintenance can cause a fail, routine maintenance such as cleaning and lubrication. This cause for example in a factory that is manufacturing can will stop the line and check the cars in that line to see if the problem is in other cars. This will cost a lot of time and money for the company to stop the line and repair and even check for other faults in the line, lack of production also downtime. This could lead to closure and loss of jobs. The reason maintenance also leads to the safety of the users to prevent thing that shouldn’t be happening. Cost would increase to fix it. Environmentally things can break down such as motor can overheat in a /we all expect that the equipment or tools we use to do our jobs is fit for purpose. It should be safe, in good working order and perform the task it is designed for without any fuss.
This is the case for most of the time but, unfortunately there are occasions when something goes wrong which results in an injury. This injury can be serious even life threatening. In many cases it has a life changing effect on the person concerned which also impacts upon the family. The consequences of an accident due to faulty equipment can be traumatic. Injuries caused by defective machinery can range from relatively mild through to serious or fatal. In regard to fatalities: there have been cases where someone has died due to faulty equipment which has a devastating effect on their family.
Examples of this include electrocution; being trapped inside a piece of machinery which causes a crush injury or a broken bone due to a defective collapsible platform. A serious injury such as amputation or a fatality is the worst case scenario. If you have sustained an injury from using defective equipment then the physical and mental effects cannot be underestimated. This is a life changing experience which impacts upon you and your family’s day to day living. The injury may be severe to the extent that you are no longer able to work which causes a loss of earnings and any future income.
Safety engineering is an engineering discipline which assures that engineered systems provide acceptable levels of safety. It is strongly related to systems engineering, industrial engineering and the subset system safety engineering. Safety engineering assures that a life-critical system behaves as needed, even when components fail. The primary goal of safety engineering is to manage risk, eliminating or reducing it to acceptable levels. Risk is the combination of the probability of a failure event, and the severity resulting from the failure. For instance, the severity of a particular failure may result in fatalities, injuries, property damage, or nothing more than annoyance. It may be a frequent, occasional, or rare occurrence. The acceptability of the failure depends on the combination of the two. Probability is often more difficult to predict than severity due to the many factors that could lead to a failure, such as mechanical failure, environmental effects, and operator error.
Task 2
Describe types of planned and unplanned procedures?
Planned maintenance is scheduled, preventative, predictive, condition, calibration and frontline servicing. Planned maintenance is a scheduled and prepared for so that when the equipment is needed to be used it would be in good condition with no faults and it would be produce good quality things. Records would be kept of the recent faults and if it has been fixed well. When a equipment picks up a fault whilst it’s been manufactured that is a loss of time and money for the company and that is unplanned. It needs to be fixed so it could be used. Routine maintenance is a procedure to maintain the quality of the equipment and to provide a long operating life and this can also prevent future problems. Total preventative maintenance is a procedure where the responsibility of the equipment is on the person who using it.
Unplanned Maintenance: Three types of maintenance system under unplanned maintenance Breakdown Maintenance system – Repair is undertaken only after failure of system. Equipment is allowed to run till it fails. Lubricating and minor adjustments are done during the period. Small factories where equipment are very small and doesn’t use special tools isn’t suitable for big industries. Opportunistic Maintenance system – In multi component system, several failing components, often it is advantageous to follow opportunistic maintenance. When an equipment or system is taken down for maintenance of one or few worn out component, the opportunistic maintenance can utilize for maintaining or changing other wear out components, even though they are not failed. It is actually not a specific maintenance system, but it’s a system of utilizing an opportunity which may come up any time. Corrective Maintenance – Maintaining action for correcting or restoring failed unit. Very vast scope for small actions like adjustment, minor repairs to redesign of equipment’s

Task 3:
Many failures have an unacceptable consequence, so we cannot always apply a breakdown strategy. If we can measure the deterioration and note the period of incipiency, it is possible to predict the time of failure. In such a case, they can schedule the work to ensure minimum disruption of production. This ability to schedule the work facilitates a quick and efficient turnaround. We call this strategy on-condition maintenance, where we can detect and rectify a deteriorating condition before there is functional failure.
In the case of hidden failures, we have to test the equipment periodically. This will identify whether it is in working condition. When we carry out the tests, we carry out failure-finding tasks. If we find the item in a failed state, we rectify it by carrying out breakdown maintenance. Under certain conditions, periodic repair or replacement of the item is warranted, even though it is still in working condition. Planned maintenance includes all of the following: Testing for hidden failures; this will help as this will be checked regularly instead of the equipment’s breaking down

Condition monitoring of incipient failures; Pre-emptive repair or replacement action based on time (running hours, number of starts, number of cycles in operation, or other equivalents of time). We can summarize the terminology discussed above with the following descriptions of the types of maintenance.