Preventive maintenance of critical assets based on degradation mechanisms and failure forecast

When dealing with critical physical assets it is very important to monitor some parameters just to observe and predict the potential time to failure and thus establish a preventive maintenance activity avoiding the unwanted failure occurrence and its consequences. According to periodic (or continuous) data gathered along the time concerning selected parameters it is possible to observe tendencies and determine time to failure, assuming a pre-defined value as the critical one, corresponding to asset failure. The present paper deals with this type of condition monitoring outlining the importance of predicting time to failure and illustrating it with an example where the evolution of a degradation parameter on time for several similar assets is observed and, based on that, the time to failure is determined, allowing to establish the right moment for maintenance for these type of assets operating in these conditions.