Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics

Abstract In our society, a trend for increasing interest in and higher priority given to reliability, maintenance, safety and security can be observed. The technical development offers every day new and more advanced tools to achieve this. The challenge to manage to predict failures and disturbances, and to estimate the remaining lifetime of components, mechanical systems and integrated systems is a very difficult one. On this route we are today only taking the first steps. For the next steps, deepening of our knowledge in many of the technological areas involved is needed, and in addition it is necessary to find holistic approaches and methodologies to integrate the different techniques involved. In this article we will present a method to integrate the tribological knowledge into monitoring and diagnostics techniques, show how the step from diagnostics to prognostics can be taken, outline a new European concept for IT-based maintenance and show the benefit of networked global diagnostic centres