Articles

Mechanical Seal Flush API Plan 53B: What Can Plant Operators Do to Help?

Mechanical seals are a great cause of concern and failures in many operating plants. This is especially true of systems that are pumping or compressing dirty fluids. Some examples include bottoms pumps, sulfur pumps, or equipment that is handling abrasive or challenging process media. Mechanical seals are often redesigned, replaced and repaired simply because of the challenging conditions these seals face during operation. This has continually led to excessive costs in terms of repair or redesign, not to mention production loss and cost associated on a critical unspared asset.

Leadership for Reliability

Improving Safety: 10 Tips, Tricks, Rules and Suggestions

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers sustained a collective 2.9 million workplace injuries and illnesses in 2015, and nearly 5,000 workers were killed on the job—an average of 13 employees every day.

As employers try to curtail those shocking numbers and improve safety throughout their facility, it’s important to examine the relationship between a safer workplace and ensuring uptime, reliability and quality asset performance.

These 10 health and safety tips for safety managers easily translate to the reliability and uptime maintenance sectors, and show you how they can help your company. Asset managers, in particular, can use these tips to acquire, operate and maintain assets in a safe, efficient manner.

Asset Condition Management

Vibration Case Study: “Crack"ing the Root Cause

At Inter Pipeline Ltd. (IPL), a petroleum transportation, storage and natural gas liquids processing company based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, a cracked weld on the suction side of a three-inch, schedule 80 balance line of a four-stage MSD mainline pump was discovered during routine monthly vibration routes. As a result, all seven identical pumps were inspected in situ using magnetic particle examination.

Asset Condition Management

The Effects of Hydrogen Sulfide Gas on Electrical Components

Having a reliable predictive maintenance program at your facility is crucial to the health of your machinery. One cannot stress enough the cost saving benefits of detecting an issue early and being able to repair it versus the cost of fixing it after a catastrophic failure has taken place. For electrical components, infrared thermography is a great technology to incorporate into any predictive maintenance program.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

ROI Calculations for Online Condition Monitoring Systems

Continuous condition monitoring (CM) is advised for those assets that run continuously, perform functions that are crucial to the production process, have grave failure consequences, are expensive to maintain, or pose a risk to personnel safety and the environment.

Before launching a CM program, though, plant operators have to identify the goals, such as increasing machine uptime, preventing failures of critical machines, protecting workers from the consequences of machine damages, or enhancing product quality.

Leadership for Reliability

Operating at Capacity: When PdM Is Not Optional

Imagine a large, global industry that competes on hair thin margins for the opportunity to deliver products continuously, requiring just-in-time (JIT) to process and other nonstop production operations. Combine the urgency of delivery with the fact that many production sites are unmanned and downtime disrupts the customer’s production operations and triggers heavy contractual penalties. Put it all together and you have all the ingredients for the perfect unplanned downtime storm.

This is the competitive environment in which major industrial gases companies operate. Many of their production operations are colocated with the manufacturing sites of customers because they’re supplying ingredients that are critical to customers’ production processes. Uninterrupted on-site delivery is a key industry success factor.

Asset Condition Management

Industrial Internet Adoption: Senior Leadership Sought

For a successful condition monitoring program, you have to have an overall Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plan. Sure, you can put monitoring devices on your equipment and extract significant value, but without an overarching plan, over time you will spend unnecessary capital funds, run into scalability issues, and underestimate the impact IIoT will have on your organization.

Asset Management

The Golden Rules for Machinery Reliability

You are probably familiar with life’s golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But have you ever wondered how any given machine, if it could express itself, would feel about this rule? What would it say? This article offers some speculative thoughts from the machine’s point of view, presented as the golden rules for machinery reliability.

Work Execution Management

EAM and CMMS: Know the Difference

Today’s market is crowded with hundreds of software systems, each trying to position itself as the perfect maintenance and asset management solution. But, they’re not all created equal. Understanding the difference between an enterprise asset management (EAM) system and a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) and knowing how to tell them apart under all the marketing hype are key to sorting through the herd and finding the asset information system that’s right for your business.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Optimizing Proactive Maintenance Using RCM

A major challenge currently confronting plant staff and management is how to deliver cost-effective and sustainable business practices based on plant performance requirements over the lifecycle of the assets. This can be especially challenging when it comes to recruiting and retaining skilled technicians who can operate and maintain an industrial complex. While it is recognized that a primary cause for this challenge is a shrinking pool of newly qualified technicians to replace the retiring workforce, a second and substantial cause is the inefficient allocation of resources that are here TODAY. What can be done to address this inefficiency? This article suggests a ready solution exists when you stop to recognize that not everything in your plants is of equal importance to achieving your objectives. Think return on investment (ROI). How can you identify those systems and equipment that are most responsible (think critical) for the loss of ROI? In the operations and maintenance (O&M) world, the selective application of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) to your plants can optimize the use of available resources. This article describes a real-world application of RCM to focus the optimal use of your available resources.

Articles

Mechanical Seal Flush API Plan 53B: What Can Plant Operators Do to Help?

Improving Safety: 10 Tips, Tricks, Rules and Suggestions

Vibration Case Study: “Crack"ing the Root Cause

From a Different Angle: A Perspective - Your Organization’s AIM Provides the Rocket Fuel!

The Effects of Hydrogen Sulfide Gas on Electrical Components

Engineers Need a Nap

ROI Calculations for Online Condition Monitoring Systems

Operating at Capacity: When PdM Is Not Optional

Industrial Internet Adoption: Senior Leadership Sought

The Golden Rules for Machinery Reliability

EAM and CMMS: Know the Difference

Optimizing Proactive Maintenance Using RCM