In the old days, project handover from contractors to owner/operator involved a big tractor-trailer and forklifts that moved crates of documents from the design and construction contractors to the plant’s records room. Most of that paper was never looked at again because it was hard to find a specific piece of information, and what one did find was likely outdated.  Fast-forward to 2010, and the truck was smaller, as more of the data was in digital form — but it was still hard to navigate through the different formats and data creation tools to find the specific bit one needed. 

Industry as well as academy put emphasis on other competences than the core engineering competencies of today. This is reflected in international engineering education standardization initiatives such as CDIO (www.cdio.org) or The Washington accord. 

Maintenance disasters caused by unexpected events, generally called “black swan” events, may be prevented by the development of Industrial AI (IAI), given its ability to find “invisible” insight in data. For centuries, swans were considered to be white, but in 1967, a black swan (Cygnus Atratus) was discovered in Western Australia. 

Recycling plastic consumer packaging waste has long been easy and is a well-established practice for most consumers. When it comes to the recycling of industrial plastic packaging, however, the situation is different, and there are hardly any systems in place for this purpose. Kiilto brought together enthusiastic partners to pilot the recovery of HDPE packaging during the year with eight customer companies. The result is a closed recycling system for packaging material.

Emerson has introduced two new compressed air dryers designed to significantly extend maintenance intervals, minimize downtime and reduce energy costs in rail applications, including brakes and door control. Typically, air dryers have an average service interval of fewer than two years. The AVENTICSTM RDD (Roll-Up Desiccant Drying) and RDDmin air dryers have a service interval of eight years or 25,000 operating hours. 

ODVA  announced that it has entered into separate agreements to further integrate FDT and FDI technologies into EtherNet/IP™. Additional device description work on the next generation xDS™ for CIP™ devices also continues to move forward. 

Thirty-five years after the Russian cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya was the first woman to take a spacewalk, a new historical event took place above our heads on 18 October 2019. Two Nasa astronauts took the first all-female spacewalk. It was not just for fun, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir were responsible for replacing defective equipment from the International Space Station (ISS), and in that way also formed the first female maintenance team in the space.

Euromaintenance 2016 will take place in Athens at the end of May. It is the ideal moment to reflect on maintenance in a European context. Euromaintenance is known as the summit for all involved in maintenance across Europe, it’s the place to be. The conference, with the support of the EFNMS, is the only commercially independent conference covering the topics we deal with in the maintenance world.