Reliability Engineering & Data Collection

TL;DR: The objective of this paper is to give the reader a better understanding of the importance of reliability engineering focusing on the collection of reliability data for the purpose of process availability, safety and preventive maintenance programs.

Abstract: International petrochemical, chemical, refining and petroleum industries are trying to implement reliability programs to improve plant safety while trying to maintain plant availability. These programs can vary significantly in size and complexity. Any kind of reliability program, like a preventive maintenance (PM) program, consists always of one or more reliability models and reliability data to execute these models. It is needless to say that the actual successful implementation and utilization of these reliability programs heavily depends on the accuracy of the reliability models and the availability of realistic data, or at least as close as possible data. The objective of this paper is to give the reader a better understanding of the importance of reliability engineering focusing on the collection of reliability data for the purpose of process availability, safety and preventive maintenance programs. The paper will first explain what reliability engineering is and why it is important for processing plants to have a reliability program. Second the paper will give an overview of different programs in use today by companies (preventive maintenance, risk based inspections, etc). Next the paper will focus on the role of reliability modeling and data. The paper will explain the kind of reliability data needed and the current available sources for this data. The focus will be on the actual data available within the plant that can among others be collected through the information derived from the archived data in the DCS systems. An excellent time to collect data is during scheduled plant turnarounds. Based on the example of a control valve the paper will explain the role that humans can play to improve the administration of reliability data during plant turnaround. Also the importance of failure analysis will be addressed. Finally the paper will conclude with an example of a decision support model which heavily depends on accurate reliability data. This example demonstrates how a plant owner can benefit from a practical application of reliability engineering.