Condition Monitoring–Successor To Preventive Maintenance?

As the hybridization of hydraulic systems and electronics continues, the “fluitronics^(R)” techniques evolving are increasing, being applied not only to systems control situations, but also to monitoring the operating conditions of the physical system. Catastrophic failure prevention, MTBF prediction, and other statistically derived techniques for minimizing machine downtime, which are the basis for preventive maintenance programs, may be drastically modified or even eliminated by rapid growth of conditioning monitoring. CM utilizes sensors and analytical techniques to determine the actual operating condition of a hydraulic or other machine system to accurately predict when incipient failure approaches and vulnerable components should be replaced in the system before failure occurs.