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Articles: Reliability Engineering

10 Things You Can Do Right Now To Improve Reliability

Publishers Note: We recently challenged our good friend and maintenance expert Ricky Smith to tell us 10 things we can do today - not 10 things we can buy today - to improve reliability at our plants. No new software, no new hardware, no new consultants. Ricky did as Ricky usually does and showed up with goods!

We admit he did include one “buy recommendation” but we let it pass because it falls under US$100. Here is what he came back with. - Terrence O’Hanlon, CMRP

5 Minute Audio Tip - Rules of Thumb for Maintenance and Reliability Engineers

Ricky Smith, CMRP explains Rules of Thumb for Maintenance and Reliability Engineers

A Toothpaste Factory Had a Problem

Cliff Williams

Many of you may have read a post by Terrence O'Hanlon on the LinkedIn site (www.linkedin.com) of the Association of Maintenance Professionals.

Availability

A tool for measuring the % of time an item or system is in a state of readiness where it is operable and can be committed to use when call upon. Availability ceases because of a downing event which causes the item/system to become unavailable to initiate a mission when called upon. In the simplest view the metric is availability = uptime/(uptime + downtime). For many other definitions see MIL-HDBK-338, section 5.

‘Big M’ and the Performance Culture

Managing Maintenance for Production Reliability

by James Davis, PE, CMRP

About 30 years ago, the Plant Engineer of an ITT Rayonier paper mill in north Florida called me into his office and announced that, as a reward for a job well done, I was being given the position of Plant Maintenance Engineer.  This was a bit confusing at first, as I was a mechanical/civil Project Engineer at the time, in a 38 year old facility that had never had a Maintenance Engineer.

Bathtub Curves

The concept is derived from the human life experience involving infant mortality, chance failures, plus a wear out period of life since data for births and deaths is accumulated by government agencies. Most equipment lacks the birth/death recording by government agencies and most non-human systems can be regenerated to live/die many times before relegation to the scrap heap.

Blast Off to Reliability

The RCM Process at United Space Alliance

by Catherine C. Kammerer

United Space Alliance, LLC (USA) is the Space Processing Operations Contractor (SPOC) for NASA at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), and Johnson Space Center (JSC).   In that role, United Space Alliance uses Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) to optimize maintenance practices for the upkeep of tens of thousands of pieces of critical ground support, launch, and flight control equipment.  USA has an institutionalized RCM process with a company policy, functional organization procedures, periodic review of performance, and metrics to track the performance.

Block Diagram Models

Reliability block diagram (RBD) models are graphical representations of a calculation methodology for reliability systems.

Building Steam

A Story of Hard Work, Dedication, and, Ultimately, Transformation

by  Judith Charlton and Steve Lipscombe

Sembcorp UK, one of the leading suppliers of utilities to UK industry, is transforming its operations.  Steam and power operations are vital to the success of Sembcorp UK and its customers in the petrochemical, power and biofuels sectors.  Just five years ago the business was struggling to manage an aging power station and all its associated problems with limited resources.  The challenges seemed insurmountable.

Capability

A measure of how well the product performance meets objectives. In short how well are the outputs actually accomplished against a standard? Capability is frequently the product of efficiency * utilization.

Case: Weibull-based Method for Failure Mode Characterization & Remaining Life Expectancy Estimation

Jorge Kalocai

1. Situation

Figure 1 shows a couple of process equipment, in order, a secondary reformer and a heat exchanger (heat recovery HPS boiler). Due to the shelling of the internal refractory wall surface into the reformer (in which hot output gases are used as hot draught at the heat exchanger), the heat exchange efficiency on the boiler was affected. Considering the existence of an internal bypass valve (final element of a PID output temperature controller) that regulates the hot draught bypass proportion, its progressive positioning to no bypass condition (to compensate for the heat exchanger efficiency loss) was considered a symptom of the failure mode degradation ("fouling" increasing).

This approach was failure mode based, so even when the potential failure mechanism was suspected, it dealt with it from a black box perspective.

Configuration Control

Configuration control is involved with the management of change by providing traceability of failures back into the design standard. If the design details are not specified, the design will not contain the requirements and thus implementation of the project will be hit or miss for achieving the desired end results beginning with the conceptual design and resulting in the operating facility.

Contracting For Reliability

Say what you want and want what you say to your vendors. Provide explanations of the objectives in contracts in terms the vendors will understand.

Cooking Reliability with Gas

By Matt Parks, John Cox, and Bill Butterworth, NiSource Gas Transmission & Storage and Winston P. Ledet, The Manufacturing Game

System Reliability at NiSource Gas Transmission & Storage: Integrating Engineering Strategies and Defect Elimination to Achieve Organizational Reliability

It is estimated that natural gas transmission companies in the U.S. own and operate over 300,000 miles of interstate and intrastate natural gas pipelines and over one thousand compressor stations integrated with numerous strategic underground storage systems. Natural gas is a major fuel for multiple end uses: electricity generation, heating, industry, and other increasingly innovative options. The unconventional gas resource of shale formations in the U.S. alone is massive with current mean projections of recoverable gas estimated to be approximately 650 Tcf (trillion cubic feet).

Corrective Maintenance Task Generation

Maintenance cost or maintenance loss? Maintenance in today's plant is a dynamic function of the ability to adapt to quick changes and to new policies and management techniques. An inherent problem common to many maintenance programs is that manpower is one of the first things considered when cost reduction is sought. The loss of manpower poses continuous challenges to any maintenance manager who is striving for world class status. Corrective maintenance experience is one of the critical areas of expertise that is often lost.

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