Cracks occur any many field equipment components. Management of these cracks ensures that catastrophic failure is avoided.
Capturing crack data electronically provides some immediate benefits.
- Creates an electronic record with time and date along with measurements and images.
- Centralizes the management of the data.
- Provides valuable data across the fleet of the bad crack performers,
- Number of occurrences,
- Number of repaired and un-repaired,
- Frequency of occurrences
- Maximum length allowable before failure
- Potential design issues
- Operation beyond possible design limits
There are 4 main steps covered for digitizing crack management.
- Identification, measurement and setting a maximum allowable length.
Field Inspectors capture, using mobile phones or tablets, the precise position of the crack on the structure by drawing the crack on a structural schematic displayed on the mobile screen. The length, severity, images, and comments are added along with possibly a flag alert to draw the supervisor’s attention. The maximum crack length can be entered to enable forecasting.
- Monitoring crack growth rate
If the crack is not immediately repaired, its propagation/growth rate can be monitored during successive inspections and measurement of crack length and condition in the field. This is also compared with the maximum crack length to forecast drop dead fix date
- Repair Work Defined and Scheduled
The cracks can be repaired immediately or scheduled for repair at the next service intervention based on the severity of the crack and its position on the component. Data provided via API to the work order can include: Component affected, precise position on component shown on schematic, length of crack, images and comments
- Completion of Repairs
The crack will be gouged and welded, its status changed to “Fixed” with costs and date recorded for the audit trail. All fixed cracks can be viewed historically with different colours on the schematic to enable viewing of where cracks have historically occurred.
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