reliability centered design

by John Shinn, Jr. and Sam Paske

The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSDGC), Ohio, serves 800,000 customers and has approximately 600 employees who work at facilities located throughout Hamilton County, Ohio. The MSD Wastewater Treatment Division operates and maintains seven major treatment plants and more than 100 smaller treatment facilities that process an average of 180 million gallons of raw sewage per day. Most of the major treatment facilities were built in the 1950s and contain over 16,000 total discrete assets that are critical to meeting MSD’s mission of protecting public health and the environment through water reclamation and watershed management.

Uptime Magazine congratulates the following outstanding programs for their commitment to and execution of high-quality Predictive Maintenance and Condition Monitoring Programs.

Dragan Trivanovic with Zellstoff Celgar Limited Partnership accepts the Uptime Award for Best Operator Driven Reliability Program

by Andrew Inman

Maintenance reliability careers are not well known these days among today’s youth. It became most evident to me at IMC 2012 last December when Terrence O’Hanlon was giving some inspirational words about the number of young maintenance professionals being too few. He narrowed the room of approximately 1,000 people in the maintenance reliability profession incrementally by age, decreasing every tenth year starting at 50. By the time he got to age 30 and below, only three or four people, including myself, were standing, additionally proving his point.

By Les Gibson – Senior Reliability Engineer

Maintenance should not be seen as a necessary evil but rather as an investment in reliability with a clear payback to the business.

By Praveen Agrawal and Gayathri Baskaran

Exploring and producing Oil and Gas involves huge risk, uncertainty, and capital investment. Assets involved in exploration and production are very complex and expensive to design, build, operate and maintain. Hence, maximizing the performance of these assets throughout their life cycle along with controlling the costs is a pressurizing factor for oil and gas companies. Oil & Gas sector also has a responsibility of strictly adhering to Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) standards along with regulatory compliance. These regulations along with past asset failures force these companies to find ways to proactively predict and prevent asset failures. Majority of asset management software implementations focus mainly on reactive and preventive maintenance only, and haven’t leveraged the capabilities of control systems like SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems), Historian, statistical tools along with failure history for predicting the asset health.