Collaborative maintenance of thermal processing systems

Under the cost pressures of globalisation, maintenance requirements have changed from a reactive maintenance to sustain the equipment functionality to a predictive maintenance strategy with minimized life-cycle costs. Measures which, on the one hand, reduce life-cycle costs and on the other hand increase the efficiency of thermal processing plants are in demand more than ever, not only in new plants, but especially at many of the older plants. Collaboration between plant operators and equipment manufacturers is a good way to come closer to these two objectives. It will be presented in this paper that collaboration in the maintenance of thermal processing systems can make remarkably good progress if the pooling of knowledge and partner resources can be used in an optimal manner. This is a strong potential for improvement that has been so far unexploited.