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Overview of Huatianmou TPM Equipment Management Expert: Strategies for preventing equipment degradation, which mainly involve three aspects: preventing degradation (or delaying it), detecting degradation, and repairing degraded equipment. I. Preventing Degradation Start with maintenance activities aimed at maintaining the performance of existing equipment, giving top priority to preventing degradation in terms of precision and performance. The wear amount increases over time, and it follows a proportional relationship within the normal average wear limits. The quality of the equipment itself is of course the main factor, but operating conditions, oil supply, circulation conditions, etc., also have a significant impact. To prevent degradation, it is important to follow proper operating procedures and maintain good oil supply and environmental conditions (especially keeping it clean). The former ensures normal operation, while the latter is for routine maintenance. Generally speaking, to prevent deterioration, normal operation and routine maintenance are necessary. Daily maintenance includes the transmission components such as bearings and gears, oiling of sliding parts and gaskets, simple replacement and adjustment of wear-prone parts, as well as cleaning of dirty areas. Daily maintenance is usually simple, but it plays a significant role in reducing equipment degradation. “The first step in “PM” is to start with routine maintenance; as long as it is carried out consistently, good results will definitely be achieved. II. Determination of degradation While regular maintenance and ensuring proper operation can help control and slow down the rate of degradation, it is still inevitable. When degradation reaches a certain level, the frontline manager of the equipment – a dedicated inspector – must be able to understand the extent of this degradation, predict and assess its trend; this is what is meant by measuring degradation. Based on the results of the degradation assessment, it is decided whether to carry out preventive maintenance or corrective maintenance. This process of measuring degradation is called spot check inspection. This type of inspection is roughly divided into good/bad condition inspections and tendency inspections. The good/bad inspection is generally used for determining degradation when performance declines, such as for the performance testing of pumps, fans, and other mechanical equipment. Trend inspection is used to determine the tendency of degradation due to sudden failures, to measure the wall thickness of pipes, towers, and tanks in order to track the trend of its thinning, to determine the timing for preventive repairs, and to make timely preparations. III. Repairing Degradation By determining the degree of degradation of equipment components through spot checks, and by knowing their remaining lifespan, it is possible to decide on the appropriate repair method – and this is what repair entails. Repairing it can indeed restore its performance, but it will never be as good as it was when new. After one repair, the performance of the equipment (parts) can be restored to a certain extent, but compared to that of new equipment, its performance continues to decline until it suddenly breaks down and becomes unusable. This is what is known as absolute degradation. Due to the emergence of new devices, older devices still suffer from relative degradation. IV. Improved Maintenance Activities such as routine maintenance (preventing deterioration), inspection checks (detecting deterioration), and preventive repairs (repairing deterioration) constitute the core elements of preventive maintenance, which is aimed at maintaining the performance of equipment. For the equipment itself, to prevent it from deteriorating, it is necessary to improve its quality. For example, improving the structure of the equipment to enhance its performance; changing the material of the components or the manufacturing processes and tolerance specifications in order to increase their service life ； Improve external conditions to strengthen inspections, maintenance, etc. This good measure to prevent the deterioration of such protective equipment is called improved maintenance. V. Design Update When the absolute and relative degradation of a device reaches a level that exceeds economic limits, the issue of discarding and updating the device arises, that is, replacing the device with poor performance with new devices that have better performance. The most fundamental measure to prevent equipment degradation is to take into account the prevention of such degradation when designing and manufacturing new equipment, even going so far as to design and manufacture equipment that requires no maintenance, thus establishing the concept of maintenance prevention (i.e., equipment reliability management). To take cost-effective measures to prevent equipment degradation, it is ideal to determine appropriate design and maintenance methods based on the equipment’s failure rate curve, the distribution of its service life, and an understanding of its characteristics (either through prediction using historical data or actual measurements), in order to minimize the costs associated with using the equipment over its lifetime. This is not only the most ideal approach but also the fundamental basis of the preventive maintenance system.