Refrigeration & Equipment Engineering

Unit 10 - General maintenance of plants

10.2.1.Breakdown maintenance
Breakdown of a machine can occur due to the following two reasons:

• Due to unpredictable failure of components which cannot be prevented;
• Due to gradual wear and tear of the parts, which can be eliminated to a large extent by regular inspections, known as preventive maintenance. From experience it can be decided that, when a part should be replaced, so that breakdown can be avoided.

In breakdown maintenance, defects are rectified only when the machine cannot perform its function any longer, and the production department is compelled to call on the maintenance engineer for the repairs. After repairing the defect, the maintenance engineers do not attend the machine again until another failure occurs.

In this type of maintenance, repair shall have to be done on failure, thus it may disrupt the whole production, if it is performing an important work. The method is much expensive also due to increase of depreciation cost, payment to idle operators, overtime to the maintenance staff for doing the emergency repairs.