Proactive Maintenance: The Key to Reducing Unscheduled Downtime
When production halts unexpectedly, it disrupts the entire supply chain, leading to delays in product delivery and potential loss of customer trust. Financially, the costs can be substantial, including lost revenue, overtime pay for workers, and expenses for emergency repairs. Additionally, frequent downtime can damage equipment, reducing its potential lifespan and increasing maintenance costs.
Thermal imaging, also known as Thermography is a powerful tool for preventative maintenance in manufacturing. It involves using infrared cameras to detect heat patterns and anomalies in equipment. By identifying areas of excessive heat, which often indicate potential failures, thermography allows maintenance teams to address issues before they lead to costly unscheduled downtime.
One of the key benefits of thermography is its non-invasive nature. Thermal imaging is performed while equipment is operating, minimizing disruptions to production. This proactive approach helps in identifying problems such as electrical faults, mechanical wear, and insulation failures at an early stage. Consequently, it enhances the reliability and efficiency of machinery, extending its lifespan and reducing maintenance costs.
Moreover, thermography provides valuable data that can be used to track the condition of equipment over time. This data-driven approach enables more informed decision-making and better planning of maintenance activities. Overall, thermography is an essential component of a robust preventative maintenance strategy, ensuring operational continuity and safety.
FLIRs cameras are sophisticated instruments that can appear daunting to the untrained user, with specialist applications requiring a deep knowledge of thermography to provide valuable insights. On the other hand, FLIRs thermal imaging cameras can simply be viewed as tools to do a job, and that job is to inform maintenance teams about the condition of critical assets. The information can provide information to predict the maintenance required, prevent failure, and avoid unscheduled downtime.
While training can be provided by organisations such as the Infrared Training Centre, or online via the FLIR Academy; FLIR offer multiple features to support both experienced and inexperienced thermographers to monitor their equipment. For example:-
FLIR Exx-series, and Txxx-series of cameras can be set-up by an experienced user to follow an ‘inspection route’, then less experienced or even beginners can follow the same route, with the camera guiding its operator to take accurate and usable images, pre-selecting the settings and parameters as required. At the end of the inspection, the thermal images can be sync’d wirelessly to a pre-prepared report, allowing easy analysis and interpretation.
This might all sound complicated, but it is just a process that once set-up, supports inexperienced thermographers to capture data in a meaningful way. All designed to provide insights into the condition of equipment around a factory, production plant or manufacturing facility.
If your maintenance teams are forever ‘fire fighting’, on high-alert, or waiting to react urgently to equipment failures, then it’s time to invest some more time and energy to get ahead of unplanned downtime, and monitor the condition of equipment. One of the best ways to do this is through thermal imaging which can be as affordable as companies need it to be, with training, or guided inspection tools readily available to meet the requirements of the technicians and engineers responsible for maintaining equipment uptime.
www.FLIR.com has more information, especially in the ‘Condition Monitoring’ section where you can request a call from one of the team of experts, who will be happy to talk through the solutions and features, or organise an on-site demo to see how FLIR cameras can support your organisation.
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