Preventive maintenance of multiple components for hydraulic tension systems

Automatically controlled hydraulic tension systems adjust the tension force of a conveyor belt under different working conditions. Failures of an automatically controlled hydraulic tension system influence the performance of conveyor belts. At present, the maintenance of automatically controlled hydraulic tension systems mainly considers the replacement of components when failures occur. Considering the maintenance cost and downtime, it is impossible to repair all the failed components to improve the hydraulic tension system. One of the key problems is selecting the most valuable components for preventive maintenance. In this paper, preventive maintenance for multiple components in a hydraulic tension system is analyzed. An index is proposed to select more reliable preventive maintenance components to replace the original ones. A case study is given to demonstrate the proposed method. When the cost budget increases, there are three different variations in the number of components for selective preventive maintenance (SPM).