Continuous track condition monitoring
How we shortened the gap between defect onset and detection for a mainline railway operator, without adding inspection staff and without replacing the CMMS they already ran.
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Articles & Case Studies
Insights
Notes on asset management and condition monitoring, written by the engineers doing the work. We publish when a project teaches us something worth passing on.
Monte Carlo simulation in quantitative risk analysis
ISO 55000 asks for decisions that balance cost, risk and performance on evidence. A risk matrix ranks; it cannot say how much, how likely this year, or what a decision is worth. Simulation can.
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Criticality should come out of the model, not go into it
A scored register asks about assets one at a time. A water network does not fail one at a time. Knock each component out, re-solve the whole system, and the asset that matters is often not the one the register says.
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Peak, RMS and crest factor: three numbers, one story
Every event arrives with a peak, an RMS and a crest factor. Read one alone and you will raise the wrong work order. Read the three together and the capture usually explains itself.
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Why we capture events, not streams
A sensor on a desert sleeper runs on a battery and a link that is sometimes there. That constraint decides how the device records, what it keeps, what it sends and when it sleeps.
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Six questions to ask before buying condition monitoring
The sensor is rarely why a monitoring programme fails. It fails at the seams: commissioning to steady state, portal to CMMS, vendor to the engineer who inherits the thresholds.
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Reading vibration: what bands B1 to B7 actually tell you
A single “overall vibration” number is not enough to make a maintenance decision. Here is what each of the seven bands diagnoses, and why band-resolved analysis changes the conversation.
ReadArticle images: Colombo Express in Altenwerder at night-799096 by Martin Damboldt, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons; Колёсные пары f001 by Ural-66, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Wadi Rum railway track, Hejaz railway, Jordan by Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Pipeline in the Mojave Desert, California by PHMSA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; JX Nippon Oil Negishi Refinery - panoramio by FoxyStranger Kawasaki, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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