Condition monitoring or condition assessment?

Prior to the end of last century I had worked exclusively in maintenance and reliability areas, focusing heavily on short life asset industries within the Oil and Gas, petrochemical and Mining sectors.

When I finally hit the utilities and infrastructure sectors I though that all the principles would be immediately transferable. This seemed logical. I knew that the scientific justification for maintenance was the second law of thermodynamics, and that our primary goal was managing the failure process based on consequences.



This, while true, is interpreted vastly differently in different sectors. A refinery, for example, is sharply focused on short and medium term failures. Design and production requirements are closely matched, and things can go very horribly wrong when parts of a refinery fail.

A waste water network, however, faces a totally different set of business pressures. Most, though not all, water networks I have encountered tend to have a lot of built in redundancy. Not only that but the components associated with high safety or environmental risks are few.

When you add to this the different revenue models (private versus public/regulated) then the entire picture changes a lot. Instead of short term - reliability - style issues, attention invariably turns to long term efficiency and affordability issues.

This tends to drive a lot of variation between the two industries types. A common and often confusing example is that of condition monitoring and assessment.

Within the Oil and Gas / Mining etc industries this tends to refer to predictions of reduced life, or detecting the warning signs of the onset of failure.

Typical technologies include Vibration Analysis, NDT technologies, oil analysis and so forth.

Within the waste water industry, as an infrastructure example, condition assessment tends to revolve around what condition the asset is currently in, and what it's remnant life is likely to be.

Simplistically you can say that one is concerned with the likelihood of failure next week, while the other is trying to accurately calculate the costs of asset management for the next decade.

This usually involves some applicable technologies such as visual inspection, NDT in some cases, even finite element analysis - but it is also as likely to contain a lot of work derived from asset performance and failure data itself.

There are a lot of subtle differences in this approach, things that don't strike you at first. Condition monitoring, for example, is generally aimed at critical failures or parameters on a few important assets.

Condition assessment however is concerned with the condition and remnant life of all the assets.

I am going to be spending a bit of time on some of the differences as I have noticed them between different industries, as well as between standard definitions of asset management. I think it is pretty important information for asset management professionals ot have, regardless of which industry they currently work in.

The reason is that many of these skills and techniques are transferable, and at present there is not a lot of cross over between the short and long life asset intensive industries.


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