Terotechnology is an art and science of physical asset management; and essentially an inter disciplinary concept. The word derived from Greek was coined in 1970 in UK to bring in common understanding between people working on different disciplines such as design, operation, maintenance, materials, and purchase. It is a combination of Management, Finance, Engineering, and other practices applied to the physical assets in pursuit of economic life cycle cost.
The practice of costing a building or a piece of plant or equipment over its life is not new. Many organizations keep some of asset records if only to arrive at the cost of output or services derived from the asset. The idea that it is possible to achieve significant savings over the total life is not so well accepted. Therefore, Terotechnology aims at emphasizing the ideal or better asset planning leading to an economic life cycle cost. In an industrial environment, the life cycle cost of any plant and machinery can be broken down into a several sequential stages. The stages are:
Design and specification stages are so critical that it would decide about 50-60% of the future cost of ownership and that it would costs less to make any changes at this stage. The larger and more complex an asset, the more difficult it is to consider or calculate the possible options and trade-offs, and the cost of putting together a system which may involve both in-house and bought out components. There will be a lot of pressure to design to a cost (and a price) rather than towards "economic life-cycle costs". Thus, at times an equipment bought cheap may cost more to run or maintain besides loss of productive hours. Advent of desktop computers in 80's made this job much simpler and currently there are host of computer aided design software available to facilitate the designer towards this ultimate goal. 'Flowjoule' is one such product that can be employed primarily for design and analysis of flows in many different energy conversion systems.