Design of Maintenance Program for a Rubber Processing Plant

Abstract

A due diligence study of a rubber processing plant was undertaken to develop a maintenance program that ensures the operational availability of machines that meets the production quota of the factory. The approach adopted includes a field visit to observe rubber processing and inspect maintenance facilities. The plant's rubber processing records were accessed and analysed to establish the operating life characteristics of the system and other key performance indicators. The result shows that the mean time between failures is 9.2 hours and the meantime to repair 102 hours with concomitant 53% operational availability of the processing line. The operating system reliability is 0.42. A review of the equipment manufacturer’s document puts the component reliability specification at 0.99 equivalent to 0.90 for 10 components in series to yield 76- an hour mean time between failures on 8-hour run. The operational availability is therefore put at 87% to be achieved on 12-hour mean time to repair corrective maintenance to meet the field production capacity of the company's rubber plantation.