Guide to Industrial Maintenance Tools

Maintenance of industrial facilities is crucial for reducing machinery breakdowns, preventing costly downtime and lost productivity, and making a plant more reliable. Maintenance relies on a wide range of industrial tools and techniques, from the hand tools we’re all familiar with to advanced thermography and condition monitoring technologies. Safety is critical at all times. It’s vital that technicians and engineers are able to carry out repairs and modifications to machinery efficiently and with minimal risk.

There are several approaches to industrial maintenance. From reactive – where engineers respond to machinery breaking down – to preventative, in which maintenance is regularly scheduled to prevent breakdown by using preventive maintenance tools. To predictive maintenance, where machinery is continuously monitored and failures even forecasted in advance. It’s the latter that relies on some of the more sophisticated tool technologies such as ultrasonic detection and vibration monitoring. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key technologies in the industrial tool armoury.

If machinery is dangerous or inaccessible for in-person inspection by the technician, remote visual inspection (using video, for example) can help determine if there are problems that must be addressed. Remote inspection tools include borescopes, tubes with cameras on one end and a display at the other, fibrescopes, flexible inspection tools using fibre optic technology, and videoscopes. These tools are particularly useful for assessing the health of hard-to-reach systems.

Condition monitoring is a mainstay of predictive maintenance solutions, which assess the health of equipment in real time and attempt to diagnose failures before they happen. Condition monitoring is typically used on rotating equipment, pumps, electric motors, compressors and internal combustion engines.

Industrial leak detection locates leaks in plant equipment using ultrasonic leak detectors and electronic leak detectors. But how do they work? Ultrasonic detectors detect leaks in pipes and valves using sound. They pick up high-frequency soundwaves produced by leaks in pressurised systems. An electronic leak detector, meanwhile, may detect refrigerants such as chlorine and fluorine in air. Many ultrasonic leak detectors feature LED displays to alert engineers to leaks and their seriousness. Leak detection tools such as these are used to detect leaks in pipes, compressed air and refrigeration systems, and vacuum-based systems.

If something is going wrong with a piece of machinery, its heat signature can be an early warning sign. That’s where thermal imaging tools come in. Thermal cameras detect equipment heat signatures and compare them to historical readings. Anomalies may indicate the need for further investigation by the maintenance engineer. For thermal imaging to work correctly, it’s important the system is operating at least around half of its load, and that the impact of ambient temperature and currents in the air is accounted for.

A computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) is essentially a database containing information about your machinery and all aspects of its maintenance. Central to the CMMS system is its asset register, which contains information such as equipment manufacturer, serial number, model and information about equipment performance and location, not to mention data on any Industrial Internet of Things instrumentation. 

The CMMS also features a work order management system. A word order is a request for a technician to carry out a task. Work order management tracks the type of task required, when the work needs to be carried out, and where it should be performed.

The CMMS makes the maintenance technician’s job easier. It means no longer having to keep track of preventive maintenance schedules on spreadsheets or pieces of paper. Instead they can be automated in the system. The CMMS also allows resources to be allocated to a job, and helps maintenance managers prioritise which tasks are most important. 

Ultimately, the CMMS system should help improve reliability and reduce downtime.

Vibration monitoring uses vibration sensors to detect anomalies in vibration speed, frequency and displacement which may indicate a fault is developing. Vibration analysis can be used to detect problems with a range of components, including rotors, bearings, gearboxes and motors.

Choosing the correct industrial maintenance tool for the job enables you to maintain equipment safely and efficiently, and makes your maintenance regime more productive, whether it’s preventative, predictive, or a mixture of both. If you’re considering which tool to use, think about the application and the outcome you want to achieve, whether it’s using hand tools for mechanical operations or the latest condition-monitoring vibration sensors to assess the condition of a machine tool. Getting the tools right benefits everyone, from the engineers using them, to the bottom line of the business when unscheduled downtime and lost productivity becomes a thing of the past. 

Want to browse the latest in PPE? We’ve got you covered here.