Ship Maintenance Basics

Ship maintenance is a crucial aspect that any company involved in the maritime industry should hold closely into view. Newly developed technologies are allowing for the continued design and development of much more complex ships with a host of innovative concepts and requirements. The cost of construction of these next generation ships, budgetary restraints, and other factors has also made ship maintenance for existing vessels necessary to maintain, adapt, and extend the life of existing vessels to meet operational requirements.

In the overall scheme of maintaining complex systems, there are three classes of ship maintenance schemes: corrective, preventive and predictive. Corrective ship maintenance occurs after a system has failed and repair to the system is necessary. Preventative ship maintenance involves the replacement of parts, adjustments to the system or changes to the system to improve the reliability of the system and prevent failure by staving off the effects of system aging. Predictive ship maintenance requires the assessment of the system by a system expert and unscheduled maintenance to prevent the possibility of the failure based on unrevealed system problems. Enforcing predictive and preventive maintenance are most effective, as the timely replacement or repair of a defective subsystem is less costly than the loss in revenue caused by an inoperative ship.

If ship maintenance is defined as ensuring that a ship continues to fulfill its intended function, the functions of the asset and its desired standards of performance define the objectives of ship maintenance with respect to any asset. Very few systems are designed to operate without maintenance of any kind, and for the most part they must operate in environments where access is very difficult, or where replacement is more economical than maintenance. High cost associated with the replacement of many systems, to ensure ship readiness, have placed greater pressure on the ship maintenance function to rapidly repair equipment and prevent failures.

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