CONDITION BASED MAINTENANCE by Mike DiLeo, Charles Manker, and John Cadick, P.E. © 1999 by - Cadick Corporation – Revised, October, 1999

Like all other efforts which require the expenditure of funds, electrical maintenance is changing. Competition, costs, and equipment complexity have increased while budgets, operating margins, and maintenance staffs have decreased. As never before, the maintenance department must be able to show a positive effect on the “bottom line.”

Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) offers the promise of enhancing the effectiveness of maintenance programs in a way that no other single concept has ever matched. This relatively new approach to maintenance uses data drawn during operations and/or maintenance intervals to forecast the need for additional or future maintenance. It extends the concepts of predictive maintenance by using data from both on-line and off-line maintenance tests.

This paper reviews the classical approaches to maintenance and then compares and contrasts them with CBM. Avariety of factors which affect the selection and performance of various maintenance alternatives are presented followed by an overview of the concepts and procedures involved in CBM. The intent is to allow readers to analyze the benefit(s) that the technique might have on their maintenance program.

This paper was presented originally at the 1993 AVO Technical Conference. In 1994 a new section (6.0) was added to describe some of the changes and events that had occurred since the original presentation. In addition to general updates, subsequent revisions have added descriptions of the analytical techniques that are being used or researched by companies which have adopted CBM.