Maintenance Policy for Sugar Refinery Centrifuges

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Abstract
The results of a study to determine the optimal policy (defined as that which minimizes downtime) for the maintenance of continuous process centrifuge machines used in a sugar refinery are reported. It was identified that the machines could ‘fail’ as a result of any one of 34 reasons, 16 being mechanical faults and 18 electrical. Sufficient data were available to enable the six faults that caused most of the unscheduled downtime to be analysed quantitatively and an optimal maintenance policy to be identified. The problem was analysed by constructing a mathematical model of the situation, identifying the failure distributions of the components of the centrifuge that caused the six faults using Weibull probability paper and then using these data to solve the model. The optimal policy was identified to be breakdown maintenance.

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