US-Brazil Collaborative Research on Intelligent Industrial Maintenance Strategies

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This CNIC proposal seeks support for a five-day planning visit by two Louisiana State University (LSU) faculty members, Drs. Marcio de Queiroz and Warren Liao, and one LSU graduate student to the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Brazil. The aim of the travel is to initiate research collaboration with UFSC faculty member, Dr. Joao Carlos E. Ferreira and his group, in the area of intelligent equipment maintenance strategies for industrial plants.Industrial equipment maintenance is often a big factor in production costs and also affects the quality of products and the production time. Thus, a company can gain a competitive edge by having an effective maintenance strategy in place. The objective of this research is to advance the state-of-knowledge in the design of equipment maintenance systems by exploiting the trend towards e-maintenance and recent progress in intelligent systems and manufacturing integration. The LSU-UFSC team has the necessary technical background for successfully tackling these topics, including the right combination of analytical and computational skills. The Brazilian collaborator brings experience in the general area of manufacturing engineering and heads the Manufacturing Integration Lab at USFC, plus maintains close ties with industry. Dr. Ferreira and his group have developed an automated distributed system that has the potential to be generalized into an intelligent maintenance strategy.The project will help to start a long-term research and educational partnership between LSU and UFSC that will integrate research and education activities. Furthermore, the equipment maintenance strategies to be developed are applicable to the numerous petrochemical plants in both countries.