Project title: Development of a condition monitoring system for Ashaka Cement PLC
(a subsidiary of Lafarge Cement PLC)

The MSc project was based on the early detection of incipient equipment failures through the optimization of conventional condition monitoring techniques, i.e. vibration, thremography, lube and wear debris analysis. Four major types of equipment have been considered as critical, namely the * coal mill drive assemblies, * coal mills, the bag house fans, * booster fans, and * bag houses.
Although the coal workshop has just been commissioned, with no records of failure, the use of the concepts of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) was used to determine the critical equipments, with sole emphasis on the impacts of the equipments' failures. Also, the recorded failures for the plant's existing raw mill workshop, by the plant's Advanced Downtime Analysis Program (ADAP) were used to identify some of the most common failure modes for the selected critical equipments, due to the similarities in configuration of the two workshops. A detailed technical specification of the critical equipments and their approximated capital costs were also provided.
Based on an extensive literature review, a suitable condition monitoring system has been proposed, which used vibration analysis as its preliminary fault identification and diagnostic technique, while other condition monitoring techniques such as oil and wear debris analysis, thermography, performance monitoring. The use of human senses was applied as confirmatory and complementary techniques. The list of