Quality Maintenance of Production Equipment: A Case Study of Bendel Feeds and Mills, Ewu, Edo State

This paper analyses the quality maintenance in Bendel Feeds and Mills, Ewu, Edo State, with a view of designing a robust maintenance process and schedule to enhance production equipment in the company. The specific objectives were to determine the failure rate in the company production equipment, establish the appropriate maintenance process needed to reduce failure rate, investigate whether the current material handling methods and practices permit high maintenance turnover and to proffer useful suggestions and ideas on how to effectively maintain production equipment in the company. Data obtained were used to analyse the materials handling equipment failure rate, MTTR, MTBF, availability, failure mode and work station. The results showed that the failure rate is more in bucket elevator equipment than other materials handling equipment. It was observed that the plant organisational structure is area controlled instead of centre controlled organisation, which is one of the problems of the plant maintenance policy adopted by the company. Maintenance of materials handling equipment of the plant can be better achieved through modified planned preventive maintenance, condition base maintenance (predictive) and equipment inspection. This analysis will be of tremendous help to practicing maintenance engineering

Robust Stabilisation of Reformer Coupled Tanks

Diesel plays a significant role in the energy consumption in most developing countries. It serves as a source of power for the transportation, agricultural and industrial sectors. Diesel is one of the product of the petroleum, being utilised in all types of compression ignition engines as fuel. Hence, the need for reformer tank to manage proper waste is needed to avoid economical loss and environmental damage. The utilisation of reformer tanks in the management of waste energy is of economic and environmental advantage to the nation. This paper presents the use of feedback linearization and back-stepping methods to control the nonlinear reformers tanks in order to achieve robust control and stabilisation of the diesel. The model was transformed to a motion control model and the efficiency of the suggested algorithm was tested. The result showed that the back-stepping controller design is satisfactory not only for the tracking performance but also for the determination of the stability region

Design and Development of Beans (Phaseolus Vulgaris) Shelling Machine

The design and construction of a beans shelling machine, using locally available materials is presented. A detailed design of the various machine components was done, and the appropriate engineering materials were selected for various parts of the machine. A working drawing, detailing the machine components was done for the shop floor fabrication of the machine. The results of the performance evaluation carried out, showed that a shelling efficiency of 81.3% was obtained. The machine has a capacity of 100kg/hr of unshelled beans and a production cost of forty-one thousand, one hundred and fifty naira (N41,150). Keywords: Beans, Shelling Machine, Efficiency, Vibration