Maintenance based on reliability

The maintenance based on reliability or Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) concept was introduced in the aeronautic sector at the end of the 1970's with the introduction of big cargo airplanes. It is now widely used by all main air companies and in other industrial sectors in search of competitiveness. The principle of this structured and rational maintenance policy is to identify materials for which the failure modes can have significant consequences on the company objectives (productivity, safety, quality, costs, etc..) and to retain only the efficient and applicable preventive maintenance tasks. This book analyses in details the mandatory steps to establish preventive maintenance programs and highlights the problems of culture changes introduced by the RCM methods. Safety functioning tools, methods and technologies of conditional and estimated maintenance are described in details and illustrated with several examples taken in different industrial sectors. One application is taken in the nuclear domain for power production with several examples of studies performed on nuclear power plants in the USA and France. (J.S.)