Abstract

Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) is widely accepted and used as a financially effective maintenance strategy, able to anticipate failure, without an unnecessary economic effort in preventive periodic maintenance. The economic benefit of CBM is achieved if such maintenance approach is applied to the right equipment and through appropriate tools. In particular the degradation behaviour of the equipment is needs to be understood to correctly deploy a CBM approach. Understanding of degradation is then strongly related with failure models . However, very little is known or published about the importance and the role of various failure models in different industrial sectors. Thus, if failure models are not understood and handled properly, the use of CBM cannot lead to financial benefits.

This paper aims at deeping the research on this topic, introducing a discussion on CBM and presenting the results of a survey carried out with different experts to obtain information about failure models. This research activity aims at encouraging the research community on the the importance and understanding of various failure models.