Extending the life of critical infrastructure assets

Industrial and infrastructure assets are critical components of modern society, and their efficient operation is essential for economic growth and development.

These complex systems include various subsystems, hardware, and sensors, including rotating and sliding parts. The failure mechanisms and degradation behaviour of these parts and subsystems can significantly impact the life of the systems.

To improve the performance and productivity of these assets, maintenance, reliability, and asset management professionals need to understand how machine components and subsystems behave.

To do this, Federation University is hosting the fourth International Conference on Maintenance and Intelligent Asset Management (ICMIAM2023) from December 6 to 8.

More than 150 engineering professionals from the energy, health, transport, and mining sectors have contributed to this international conference and will come together to learn new ways to strengthen their businesses.

Among the research to be presented, a Federation research team that includes Dr Gopi Chattopadhyay, who is the general chair of the conference, proposes a structured methodology for Life Extension decision-making – this focuses on risk-informed upgrades of long-life assets cost-effectively while assuring better performance with risk mitigation, safety, and security.

Life Extension is essential to capital-intensive industries such as offshore energy, chemical plants, mining, transport, water, power, defence and nuclear power.

The process involves extending the life of complex assets beyond their expected lifespan through various strategies such as replacement, reconditioning, and repair.

Life Extension is often hindered by the lack of access to detailed maintenance records and appropriate data, limiting the ability to have well-informed decision-making regarding long-life capital assets.

ICMIAM2023 is jointly organised by Federation University, the Asset Management Council of Australia and the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE). It is supported by Lulea Technological University, the University of Huddersfield, the University of Johannesburg, the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Chitkara University and Asset Management Society India. The IEEE Victorian Section is the technical co-sponsor of the conference.

Dr Chattopadhyay said it takes competent, knowledgeable and skilled maintenance, reliability and asset management professionals to make these components work.

“Ageing assets and the ever-increasing demand of skills for managing and upgrading capital-intensive complex assets are major challenges of industries and asset owners to assure the integrity of their assets and infrastructure to assure that these assets are safe for their employees, the environment and the community,” Dr Chattopadhyay said.

“Organisations are also looking to reduce their costs along with reducing risks and further enhancing the performance including safety for making the world a better and safer place to live.”

For more details, visit ICMIAM2023.