Abstract
Process plants need to produce more and more to keep up with growing demand. However, these plants are also becoming eroded and dysfunctional due to the lack of maintenance, in this case preventative maintenance (PM). PM is the schedule or periodic checking, to detect the degradation of equipment on a plant. Achieving such maintenance efficiently and effectively is a vital activity to ensure good, safe, and high product quality on a plant. This research considers the technical personnel’s perception towards conducting preventative maintenance on flow measuring instruments on their respective plants. This research looks at the preventative maintenance activities that are required on flow meter instrumentation. It also considers the impact of not conducting such maintenance and the importance of this maintenance as perceived by technical personnel responsible for the plant. Through literature review, primary preventative maintenance activities are presented. All these activities need to take place in order to keep instruments from failing abruptly in order to avoid degradation, profit losses and to minimize downtime on the process plant. A survey in the form of a questionnaire was distributed using snowball methodology. 101 technical personal in three different industries across the SADC region responded to the questions. Each participant indicated where they were from and they type of plant they worked on. The participant’s responses also included if they conducted preventive maintenance proactively or not, as well as the impact of not conducting such maintenance...
M.Phil. (Engineering Management)