Maintenance in the food industry

Maintenance is important in every industry to keep machines operating efficiently but also safely and sustainably. This also applies to machines and installations in the food industry. Here, however, there are additional requirements to ensure hygiene and thus food safety. Technical developments support the sector and make it possible to carry out maintenance efficiently and safely at a time when insufficiently skilled personnel are available.

The developments regarding maintenance in the (food) industry are interesting and especially possible due to technical developments in various fields. Whereas maintenance "used to be" mainly corrective (the proverbial putting out of fires), nowadays companies in the food industry work at least preventively, but also increasingly predictively.

Benefits of predictive maintenance

The main advantage of predictive maintenance is that it allows maintenance to be performed at exactly the right time. Not too early, incurring unnecessary costs in time and materials, but also not too late. The latter case means that machines fail unplanned, start using more energy or potentially pose a food safety hazard. For example, because leaks introduce coolants into the process or create other types of contamination. Furthermore, predictive maintenance is based on gathering a lot of (big) data, which also has value for identifying possible trends. On this basis, not only can maintenance be tuned, but also measures can be taken to optimize processes: more economical, efficient, faster, cheaper, hygienic or leading to better product quality.

Gathering data

Predicting maintenance based on data requires thorough preparation. For example, research is needed into the most critical elements of a machine or plant and, in addition, into the quantities that indicate the condition of such an element. For example, maintenance is regularly performed based on the number of running hours. In itself not illogical, but machines that run continuously at a fixed speed will have a different maintenance requirement than machines that constantly turn on and off, contain elements whose direction of rotation changes regularly or whose speed varies. Know what you are measuring is therefore the motto.

Vibration measurements

One quantity that in many cases says something about the condition of an entire machine is vibration. The vibration level of various machine parts - including bearings - and especially the change in the level over time, among other things, says something about lubrication, wear and alignment. Temperature and pressure are also quantities that can give an early indication of whether maintenance is needed in the near future. Temperature is also a quantity that is important in the context of product quality (too high a temperature can promote bacterial growth).

Processing data

Processing all the data requires sophisticated analysis software that can draw conclusions regarding desired maintenance. Because the amount of data can be considerable, there are now also solutions on the market that only transmit data (wirelessly) that exceeds certain limits (preset). This prevents computers from becoming overloaded and predictive maintenance from consuming a lot of energy in processing data. A disadvantage is that this makes it less easy to determine trends and that the entire package of data can also serve as evidence when a food safety incident occurs.

Finally, a good maintenance program is desirable to properly schedule maintenance predicted from this data. Feedback from maintenance engineers complements the palette of data to provide an even broader view of machine condition.