Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Promote Proactive Reliability

Promote Proactive Reliability

A Reliability Tip
Detecting Failure Modes Through Instrumentation:

Most physical assets these days contain a large amount of instruments for monitoring and managing the operation of that asset. Maintenance is not often aware of the potential in these configurations to identify failure modes using the assets instruments. One reason is that maintenance often looks for a single point of data to isolate the failure mode, and most times targeting a failure mode in this way would require several instruments. I call this "Triangulation". An example of this I have witnessed recently was in a plate heat exchanger. In this example 2-4 instrument outputs were required to target a specific failure mode.

In the example of the plate heat exchanger, the failure mode they targeted was fouling or loading of the exchanger internally. Temperature and flow instruments they created a thermal efficiency calculation in their DCS which displayed the exchangers performance in real time. When the exchanger loaded up, or otherwise declined in its performance operations requested the exchanger be disassembled inspected and cleaned. This detection method also applies for corrosion which reduces the thermal efficiency of the plates as well. By taking this approach they eliminated a minimum of 30 hours of work and downtime each year for each of their 12 heat exchangers, and made this part of their maintenance program entirely condition based.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

MRG is published in Uptime Magazine!

Be sure to check out Management Resources Group, Inc. in the April/May 2011 issue of Uptime Magazine!

Business Case for Data Integrity
Written by Robert DiStefano (Chairman and CEO) and Stephen Thomas

[click here]