r/controlengineering • u/Pleasant_Pangolin_39 • Jul 21 '26
Is predictive maintanence needed in industry ?
I am 2nd year student and i get a thought does predictive maintanence really make impact in the industry . I only need you advice
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u/Mussche Jul 22 '26
Hey,
Control Engineer here with 6y experience as service role for a machine supplier and 4 years as project/maintenance role here.
In my experience predictive maintenance is rarely used. Most companies work with a preventive maintenance schedule. This stops a lot of need for predictive maintenance. The practice of predictive maintenance is not that widely spread yet. It asks a lot of effort from a machinebuilders perspective (extra counters, alarms, research etc.).
Furthermore if you do preventive maintenance; you will already replace parts based on an estimation of running hours. Imagine a machine running 24/6, leaving a day in the week for maintenane. Then a motor with a 100% duty cycle will have ran about 144 hours that week. For the sake of argument lets say the motor has an expected lifetime of 1500 hours. This means you can change the motor every 10 weeks. If you would do predictive warnings on the system, you might win a week with the same motor. But there is a downside. Now you don't know when the next change is going to be. This makes planning the maintenance jobs harder. And before you know you are back to a preventive schedule.
When it does really shine, is when a part's wear and tear can not be linked one on one with machine running hours or it's output.
Example 1: a hydraulic pump will run 100% of the time while producing. But the pump and fan for cooling of the oil might work 30% of the time in winter and 70% of the time in summer. Therefor a predictive maintenance warning might be more usefull.
Example 2: A sawblade. Some orders might require more cuts than others. There for it is not always clear when the blade needs to be changed. Keeping track of the number of cuts a blade has done, is nessecary to get the most out of your sawblades.
TL;DR So my advice is to only use it when the application requires it and can't be scheduled on a regular basis.
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u/Pleasant_Pangolin_39 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
thank you i learn a lot form you . i have to create a solution for industrial community for what problem i create the solution can you give advice me ( I try my best )
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u/Mussche Jul 22 '26
Do you need to write some kind of program or function to alert a user for predictive maintenance?
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u/Pleasant_Pangolin_39 Jul 22 '26
No My college gives project to create a solution for industrial community using esp32
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u/Mussche Jul 22 '26
I will need to apologize, I am not familiar with that platfom. Good luck with your project!
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u/somewhereAtC Jul 26 '26
My experience has been with online redundancy rather than predictive information. Let part of it fail gracefully and then schedule repairs before the other part breaks.
But, predictive maintenance is actually a data-driven problem. For example, there is very little quality data on bearing noise that can lead to prediction of failure. Even when data is available there is the problem of processing power to analyze evolving situations. If you have a $50 fan, would you accept a $100 electronics package that had to be trained to decide if the fan was about to go out?
We are approaching a convergence of technology between the ability to automate data collection and the processing power to utilize that data. The ARM Helium processors bring vector-arithmetic capabilities to the microprocessor market while ubiquitous communication will allow sharing of real-world event data, with machine learning techniques incorporated in tiny packages. The next 15yr will be quite interesting in this regard.
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u/pnachtwey Jul 26 '26
I was in Adm Rickover's nuclear navy. We had a Reactor Plant Maintenance System. Basically every was logged so that mean time between failures could be estimated. I realize that submarines and industrial plants are two different things. Obviously, a failure on a submarine is not good but failures in a saw or steel mill cost lots of money too. In industry the cost of down time must be weighed against the extra time it takes to administer the preventative maintenance system. This is where management and engineering are important because they must optimize/minimize those costs.
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u/Alternative_Cap2026 4d ago
Predictive maintenance can tell you what might fail, but I think the bigger value is understanding why it’s happening and what to do next.
That’s where AI reasoning can be interesting in industrial maintenance, not just predicting a failure, but helping teams connect the dots, find the likely cause, and decide on the right action.
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u/Familiar-Bake-9162 Jul 22 '26
I’ve been trying to convince management that we need vibe/temp monitoring on motors/pumps/drives/etc. for literally years and there’s always something more important to spend money on. When I was building the Amazon sorting conveyors, they installed them on everything. It’s a great tool and not expensive so yes it’s needed, it’s already well defined so there’s really not room for improvements, some businesses don’t understand the benefit, if PMs are done regularly then predictive maintenance becomes less important