A discussion of using self-maintenance technology to achieve high reliability of equipment

Reliability and maintainability is an indivisible entity. High reliability of equipment can reduce or avoid the cost caused by shutdown and maintenance which is induced by faults. This can be done through improving the maintainability of the equipment, and it can compensate the disadvantage of the large amount of money which is caused by merely increasing reliability. Compare to the traditional maintenance task, for the self-maintenance technology can detect the faults of the equipment timely and monitor the integrity of structure to heal itself, it can provide higher reliability to equipment. Based on the research of the self-maintenance theory and the prognostics and health management (PHM) technology, a framework of maintainability design based on the self-repairing technology is presented in this paper. A discussion of the application value gained through using the self-maintenance technology to the equipment, such as man-made satellite, that may have a heavy loss caused by faults which are difficult to maintain is provided.