The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) announces a new tech brief focused on advances in predictive maintenance, also known as condition-based maintenance (CBM+).
Over the past several decades, industries with high-value assets have increasingly pivoted from reactive to predictive maintenance to reduce operational costs. Unlike reactive maintenance, which makes repairs to components after they break, and preventative maintenance, which schedules inspections, repairs, and replacements before parts become damaged, predictive maintenance/CBM+ is maintenance based on the evidence of need.
Sensors embedded in critical equipment components monitor the equipment’s condition in near-real time, sometimes even while the asset is in use. The objective of CBM+ is to accurately detect the current state of mechanical and electrical systems and predict systems’ remaining useful lives; this enables cost-effective maintenance to be conducted before catastrophic failures can happen.
NCMS has been teaming up with researchers, industry innovators, and the Department of Defense (DOD) to fuel the development of CBM+ technologies in four main areas: electronics, software, vehicle monitoring, and non-destructive inspection (NDI).
Projects carried out under NCMS’s Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA) Program include the development of:
- Ruggedized sensors for collision avoidance systems
- Digital twin and digital analytics for ship machinery health monitoring
- Advanced diagnostics and prognostics systems for autonomous vehicles
- High-frequency acoustic emission (AE) signals for damage and wear assessment
To learn more, see the full technology brief here: https://www.ncms.org/condition-based-maintenance-plus-cbm-protects-high-value-assets/.
