The various types of Maintenance

Maintenance services are essential to anticipate and repair machine and computer system breakdowns, and to limit the risks for an industrial company as much as possible. But there are different types of maintenance, divided into two families.

I. Preventive maintenance

This type of maintenance is carried out according to predetermined criteria, with the objective of reducing the probability of equipment failure during use, reducing downtime in the event of overhaul or breakdown and eliminating the causes of serious accidents.

I.1. Systematic preventive maintenance

It follows a schedule generally established according to time but also according to the quantity of products manufactured, the distance covered when goods are transported, or the number of cycles performed, etc. This maintenance method requires knowledge of the behavior of the equipment, the modes of degradation and the average time of good functioning between two failures. It applies to the maintenance of equipment whose failure may cause serious accidents, as the equipment has a high failure cost.

I.2. Conditional preventive maintenance

Conditioned to a predetermined type of event: a diagnosis, information from a sensor, a wear measurement. This predictive maintenance is therefore a maintenance dependent on experience and using information collected in real time. It aims at identifying weak points. These regular and rigorous controls make it possible to highlight the operating condition of the equipment. Depending on the case, it is advisable to put the equipment under surveillance and then to decide on an intervention when a certain threshold is reached.

II. Corrective maintenance

Corrective maintenance operations take place once a failure has been identified.

II.1. Curative maintenance

This form of maintenance is applied when a malfunction is detected. Its purpose is to repair this anomaly. Contrary to the palliative which acts in the urgency, it is about a true restoration in the long term, in a definitive way. The curative maintenance is a priority repairing because the stops of production cause heavy losses for the companies.

II.2. Palliative maintenance

It aims at restoring an asset to a specified state: this does not necessarily mean its initial state. The palliative maintenance operation will have to restore these tools to their required function, but not to their original appearance. It is an action intended to allow an asset to function temporarily.