Reliability centered maintenance of circular loom

Abstract

Today’s customers demand not only product variety but also expect quick delivery of products. In order to meet these challenges from customers, manufacturing companies will have to ensure timely availability of raw materials, cutting tools, machine tools, people etc. Thus, availability of machine tools is one important factor that determines whether the customer’s demand can be met by the manufacturing company or not. Availability of machines means machine should be available whenever its service is required. In order to increase the machine availability or machine uptime, maintenance is done. Thus, maintenance would help in extending the useful service life of the machine tools. In industries, maintenance of certain machine tools is done at regular intervals. This type of maintenance is known as preventive maintenance. For certain machine tools, maintenance will be done after the breakdown of machine tool. This type of maintenance is called breakdown maintenance. The main constraint faced by many manufacturing companies is that there is a limitation on the maintenance budget. This has made many manufacturing companies start thinking in new ways for solving maintenance problem. In this context, reliability centered maintenance (RCM) assumes special significance. The objective of RCM is to bring down the maintenance cost. RCM, while focusing is on system’s functionality, will also help in achieving safety aspect and reliability aspect of the system. Expert choice software is employed for AHP computation. The application of RCM technique in the maintenance of circular loom is not reported in Literature. In this context the current research assumes special significance. Research findings presented in this paper are going to help both academicians and researchers.