AEDC paving way for maintenance practices

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) is leading the way for the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) to move toward formally adopting and refining a more proactive and efficient approach to maintaining the command's multi-billion dollars worth of industrial plant systems and infrastructure making up its test, product and logistics centers, laboratory and wings. 

"I've learned that they have a great reliability maintenance program at AEDC," said Johnny Dillon, AFMC's reliability council chairman at Tinker Air Force Base (AFB), Oklahoma City, Okla., "probably one of the best that the Air Force has. And they're true leaders in applying these advanced technologies to do diagnostic capabilities for antiquated and new equipment. All of the Air Force's equipment needs to be highly reliable, maintainable and available for production and operations when necessary. AEDC is doing an outstanding job of doing that." 

Dillon was among six others from Tinker AFB and two Jacobs Technology reliability engineers who were on base recently to attend reliability-centered (RCM) maintenance classes, tour the facilities and learn more about AEDC's blueprint for maintenance practice improvements. 

Bob Walker, the 804th Maintenance Squadron's technical director, said AEDC teamed up with other AFMC installations to form the AFMC Reliability Council to allow for coordination and implementation of training. 

Walker said this has been accomplished through video teleconferencing and by holding classes on base in these new maintenance practices. 

"The bottom line, right up front, is that reliability-centered and condition-based maintenance (CBM) results in an increase in reliability," he said. "AEDC is paving the way for AFMC by implementing these industry standard practices here and communicating the savings. At Arnold, these maintenance practices have already resulted in costs avoided, reduced test customer schedule delays and optimized the maintenance process for our most critical systems and equipment." 

Walker said the Air Force has been applying RCM and CBM to weapon systems for years, citing legacy aircraft that are still in service after 30, 40 and even 50 years. 

He said what distinguishes the new approach is application of these methods to industrial plant equipment. 

"Twenty years ago, the cost-benefit wasn't there, but now we are realizing the value of reliability to our customers, work force and creating a safe workplace," he said. "CBM technology has really expanded with the advent of computer customization, smaller and cheaper ultrasound and infrared inspection systems, and computerized maintenance management systems." 

Walker used an analogy he said most people should be able to identify with to explain how RCM and CBM work. 

"Most of us own cars, homes and things that need to be maintained," he said. "If you prioritize the maintenance you perform based on the required reliability, i.e. your daughter is driving her car a long way to college and you only see her on holidays. Then you will want to make sure you are 'reliability centered' and inspect her car while she is at home so that you do not have to perform an unnecessary emergency repair somewhere in the middle of the night far from your home. 

"By inspecting, we can understand the car's condition and replace oil, filters, windshield wipers, belts and so on, based on their condition and not just the calendar or even the number of miles since last change out. That saves us money. That is condition-based maintenance. Today, the best practice is to check the condition of your oil, belts, tires and other components that wear and replace as needed. By extending oil changes, we save money. By checking the air in your tires, you save gas mileage as well as extend tire life. So, that's RCM and CBM in a nutshell." 

Walker said industry has proven the return on investment of RCM by reducing unnecessary capital expenses, avoiding production downtimes, experiencing fewer safety incidents, and doing only what is necessary in terms of maintenance. 

"At AEDC, we want to re-invest our maintenance savings and cost avoidances to expand inspections to more equipment, offer more and better training and follow-through on efforts like configuration management," he said. 

Walker cautioned that the implementation of RCM takes time and money to perform analysis and set up equipment with health monitoring or improved preventive maintenance procedures and processes. 

"It is difficult to directly link investment cost of CBM technologies to maintenance savings," he said. "I am sure the folks in our local emergency rooms do not validate the savings of their equipment in terms of the value of lives saved. Program development takes years of planning, training, developing trust with operator-maintainers in the field, and proving the technology in the field." 

Moving to this new approach for maintenance requires a continual review of how maintenance is conducted in every part of AEDC, to move away from calendar-based maintenance, Walker said, or "we-have-always-done-it- that-way" maintenance and focus on the condition of equipment and reliability requirement. 

Maintenance technicians conduct inspections, oil analyses and other lab tests and employ the latest monitoring technologies, including infrared sensors and other non-intrusive systems to look for conditions which may lead to failure. 

Walker said the AEDC Center Commander, Col. Art Huber, recently sent a report with two examples of their CBM initiatives to headquarters to demonstrate the potential savings as related to Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century.

"One of them was an infrared inspection of transformers," Walker said. "We used an infrared camera to look for hot spots." 

He said the training for the workers, the cost of the camera and the procedure ended up costing a few thousand dollars. The inspection revealed that the hot spot was being generated by loose bolts that were not making a good connection, but generating heat. 

"If we had not taken an action to tighten the bolts back up it might have arced and we could have blown the transformer, a million dollar piece of equipment that takes months to replace" he explained. 

"So, we spent very little money and we avoided a major failure. That would include the cost of the transformer plus the cost of the down time - lost test time and also, the customer's perception of us being reliable or not so reliable and maybe avoided someone getting hurt." 

Walker said the push now is to adopt more automated monitoring systems to keep up with the large number of assets at a place like AEDC. Otherwise, it becomes a labor-intensive and more expensive effort. 

"Working with AFMC, we have proven the need for Industrial plant equipment-systems' management," he said. "We have also proven the need to design for maintainability and increase operator participation. We have tried to emphasize that cost avoidance should result in funds being re-allocated to maintenance rather than having hard earned maintenance dollars going back to headquarters. We have demonstrated that training, cooperation and coordination in lessons learned is the way to go." 

He said the center commander is particularly interested in work force development. This requires tailoring the whole maintenance process to the end users in specific systems as well as those who manage those areas. This has already resulted in training a wide range of people on base, from the craftsman, technicians to upper management, including Dr. David Elrod, ATA's General Manager. 

"We are fortunate to have so many talented and motivated people in our government-contractor work force," Walker said. "I want to particularly mention the leadership of Ramesh Gulati, ATA reliability engineer, who has literally 'written the book' on best maintenance practices and teaches groups of AEDC personnel the fundamentals of RCM." 

Walker is leading a command-wide effort to develop a maintenance handbook that standardizes practices and terminologies as well as captures lessons learned for all bases, depots and test centers to use. This handbook is geared for the maintainer who wants to tailor or "right size" their maintenance program to suit their specific situations and particular requirements.