The State of the Art in Fuel Cell Condition Monitoring and Maintenance

Fuel cell vehicles are considered to be a viable solution to problems such as carbon emissions and fuel shortages for road transport. Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) Fuel Cells are mainly used in this purpose because they can run at low temperatures and have a simple structure. Yet to make this technology commercially viable, there are still many hurdles to overcome. Apart from the high cost of fuel cell systems, high maintenance costs and short lifecycle are two main issues need to be addressed. The main purpose of this paper is to review the issues affecting the reliability and lifespan of fuel cells and present the state of the art in fuel cell condition monitoring and maintenance. The Structure of PEM fuel cell is introduced and examples of its application in a variety of applications are presented. The fault modes including membrane flooding/drying, fuel/gas starvation, physical defects of membrane, and catalyst poisoning are listed and assessed for their impact. Then the relationship between causes, faults, symptoms and long term implications of fault conditions are summarized. Finally the state of the art in PEM fuel cell condition monitoring and maintenance is reviewed and conclusions are drawn regarding suggested maintenance strategies and the optimal structure for an integrated, cost effective condition monitoring and maintenance management system

ISO55000 Standard as A Driver for Effective Maintenance Budgeting

Companies are suffering from major industrial disasters, financial crisis and continued global instability caused by civil unrest and economic pressure.With the attendant issues associated with the increased economic and market globalization comes the criticality of standards and its role in, increasing productivity and efficiency, decreasing non-value-added information and promoting process through structured asset management techniques. The International Standard for Organization (ISO 55000) was developed specifically for Asset Management (AM), which consists of a series of three components, ISO 55000, ISO 55001 and ISO 55002. ISO 55000 takes a holistic approach to asset management; it is not just about maintenance but also about value creation. ISO 55000 requires changes in policy, processes and people thereby challenge the status quo and it leads to a new regime of asset care. Asset care requires organizations to comply with standards and various regulations. Adopting ISO 55000 will allow organization to align the way assets are managed and maintained, it improves return on investments by reducing costs, while supporting asset value without sacrificing organizational objectives. Maintenance and reliability processes, programs are aligned with ISO 55000, and span the entire life cycle of the assets including design, engineering, procurement, installation, start-up, operation, maintenance, restoration, decommissioning, and disposal. A popular term for the process is 'from cradle to grave'. Physical assets are often taken for granted and with increased reliability. Managing assets today is more complex, yet in many organizations, the management of those assets is often unfocused and inappropriate. Organizations with a strong profit focus need to examine ISO 55000 from the perspective of finding methods to leverage it into lower costs and increased outputs. The aim of this paper is to classify the necessary elements in ISO 550000, which organizations need to adopt in order to improve their approach to asset maintenance budgeting. It will highlight the main issues that need to be addressed when implementing ISO 55000 standard

Assessing the Effectiveness of ISO 55000 Standard in Small to Medium Sized Enterprises

The increased economic and market globalization means the criticality of standards and its role in exploiting network externalities has had an influence on increasing productivity, and efficiency, decreasing non value added information and promoting process management. The ISO 55000 series is a comprehensive and detailed standard, which helps to create an improved methodology to implement an asset management system within an organisation. Asset management is an important part of any organisation, as it allows them to extract value from their assets. ISO 55000 series consists of three segments namely ISO 55000, ISO 55001 and ISO 55002, which aims to provide a standardised framework for an asset management system. AM is a combination of management, financial, economic, and engineering activities and the effectiveness of a universal view has been acknowledged but is not wholly developed especially within small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The document, could be seen as limited as it states what should be done, not how to do it

Maintenance Knowledge Management with Fusion of CMMS and CM

Abstract- Maintenance can be considered as an information, knowledge processing and management system. The management of knowledge resources in maintenance is a relatively new issue compared to Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) and Condition Monitoring (CM) approaches and systems. Information Communication technologies (ICT) systems including CMMS, CM and enterprise administrative systems amongst others are effective in supplying data and in some cases information. In order to be effective the availability of high-quality knowledge, skills and expertise are needed for effective analysis and decision-making based on the supplied information and data. Information and data are not by themselves enough, knowledge, experience and skills are the key factors when maximizing the usability of the collected data and information. Thus, effective knowledge management (KM) is growing in importance, especially in advanced processes and management of advanced and expensive assets. Therefore efforts to successfully integrate maintenance knowledge management processes with accurate information from CMMSs and CM systems will be vital due to the increasing complexities of the overall systems. Low maintenance effectiveness costs money and resources since normal and stable production cannot be upheld and maintained over time, lowered maintenance effectiveness can have a substantial impact on the organizations ability to obtain stable flows of income and control costs in the overall process. Ineffective maintenance is often dependent on faulty decisions, mistakes due to lack of experience and lack of functional systems for effective information exchange [10]. Thus, access to knowledge, experience and skills resources in combination with functional collaboration structures can be regarded as vital components for a high maintenance effectiveness solution. Maintenance effectiveness depends in part on the quality, timeliness, accuracy and completeness of information related to machine degradation state, based on which decisions are made. Maintenance effectiveness, to a large extent, also depends on the quality of the knowledge of the managers and maintenance operators and the effectiveness of the internal & external collaborative environments. With emergence of intelligent sensors to measure and monitor the health state of the component and gradual implementation of ICT) in organizations, the conceptualization and implementation of E-Maintenance is turning into a reality. Unfortunately, even though knowledge management aspects are important in maintenance, the integration of KM aspects has still to find its place in E-Maintenance and in the overall information flows of larger-scale maintenance solutions. Nowadays, two main systems are implemented in most maintenance departments: Firstly, Computer Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), the core of traditional maintenance record-keeping practices that often facilitate the usage of textual descriptions of faults and actions performed on an asset. Secondly, condition monitoring systems (CMS). Recently developed (CMS) are capable of directly monitoring asset components parameters; however, attempts to link observed CMMS events to CM sensor measurements have been limited in their approach and scalability. In this article we present one approach for addressing this challenge. We argue that understanding the requirements and constraints in conjunction - from maintenance, knowledge management and ICT perspectives - is necessary. We identify the issues that need be addressed for achieving successful integration of such disparate data types and processes (also integrating knowledge management into the “data types” and processes)

Identifying current challenges of data-based maintenance management: a case study

Exabytes of data from various sources are available for maintenance decision makers. The yearly increase in data is exponential due to technological developments such as the rapid increase in the amount of interconnected systems and assets, which utilize smart sensors, cloud-based computing and eMaintenance. All of these are supported by the rapid developments in the Internet. The data provide vast possibilities for smart, autonomous assets and predictive maintenance. However, in practice, there are technical, managerial, and organizational challenges, which impede the maintenance decision makers from exploiting the information retrieved from the data analyses. The existing literature has discussed the data required in different maintenance decision making situations extensively, although there is a limited number of academic publications which explore general-level frameworks or tools to support the management of maintenance data. This paper builds upon a review of the current literature on the value of maintenance data management. The data needed to support a number of different maintenance management situations are discussed, and an approach to analyze and increase the value and resource efficiency of the maintenance data management process is suggested. The paper presents a case study example conducted in collaboration with a UK manufacturing industry. The objective of the paper is to map the current state of maintenance data exploitation paths. This makes the different value-based development needs in the data management process visible. The results of this paper will contribute to future empirical research including modelling and optimizing the use of data in maintenance decision making through adopting lean management principles. The majority of previous lean management research has focused on the optimal management of production processes and the maintenance processes. In this research, the principles of lean management will be taken to the level of optimizing the maintenance data management process

Identifying Organisational Requirements for the Implementation of an Advanced Maintenance Strategy in Small to Medium Enterprises (SME)

In many organisations the production equipment represents the majori-ty of invested capital, and deterioration of these facilities and equipment increases production costs, reduces product quality and has a significant impact on energy consumption. Over recent years the importance of maintenance, and therefore maintenance management within manufacturing organisations has grown. The maintenance function has become an increasingly important and complex, activity – particularly as automation increases. The opportunity exists for many organisa-tions to benefit substantially through improvements to their competitiveness and profitability by adopting a new approach to maintenance management. Several tools and technologies including Condition Based Maintenance, Reliability Cen-tred Maintenance and more recently E-Maintenance have developed under the heading of Advanced Maintenance Strategies. However, the adoption of advanced maintenance strategies and their potential benefits are usually demonstrated in large organisations. Unfortunately, the majority of organisations, classified as Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), are constrained by the lack of knowledge and understanding on the requirements which need to be in place be-fore adopting an advanced maintenance strategy. This paper will present the find-ings from an extensive literature review and an ex-amination of multiple case studies. The results show that there is a set of key requirements which strongly in-fluence the implementation of an Advanced Maintenance Strategy (AMS) within SMEs

Development of a low cost mixed fuel hydrogen/petrol system for reducing vehicle emissions

Discussions surrounding the hydrogen economy centre primarily on the use of ultra clean hydrogen to power Fuel Cells. This paper examines the potential for burning hydrogen in ICEs as part of a mixed fuel charge in order to take advantage of cheaper brown hydrogen and the advanced nature of the modern petrol ICE. This paper presents a low-cost mixed fuel ICE solution that was developed and fitted to a gasoline spark ignited production vehicle. The findings from a series of investigative performance tests are presented, which show a reduction of three primary pollutants: CO2; CO and hydrocarbons along with a set of drive cycle tests from which full emission results were collected. These showed that in a full driving cycle care must be taken with the engine mapping in order to ensure a complete burn in all modes of operation. In addition the anticipated NOx increase was impossible to avoid but the authors suggest practical steps to reduce this to acceptable levels