Remaining lifetime Evaluation for Crankshaft Main Bearings 2008-01-1654

All automotive fleets' ownerships want to increase their fleets' availability; therefore, they resort to consider the conventional maintenance policy. Despite of, this policy increases fleets availability but the cost will be high. This is due to replace the parts before the end of their lifetime. On the other hand, this policy is based on time where it is not cost-effective. Consequently, this conventional maintenance policy is not adequate to fulfill the needs of high availability for automotive fleets. However, in this paper the study is directed to condition-based predictive maintenance concept as an alternative policy to determine fleet's health for increasing the fleet availability and to reduce the operating cost. The concept is based on predicting the system degradation and calculating the reliability function for the component. An application carried out on internal combustion engine crankshaft main bearing to illustrate the effectiveness of this technique. The results indicate that knowing the remaining lifetime for engine crankshaft main bearing is very important to take the repair or replacement decision in a suitable time.