Wednesday, December 24, 2014

PLANTS MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT

INTRODUCTION

The objectives of a plant maintenance program should be to the improve the over-all plant reliability and safety by preventing equipment breakdown, and to maintain the equipment in a satisfactory condition for normal operation or emergency use; all at the lowest possible maintenance cost.

SCOPE

The program encompasses the practical and technical approaches to provide a complete and well rounded program to cover every aspect of good Preventive / Predictive and Equipment Condition Monitoring Maintenance. The scope of this procedure will cover program development, personnel requirements and responsibilities and equipment requirements.




MAINTENANCE STRATEGIES

Maintenance is the combination of all those technical and administrative actions, including supervisory actions, with the purpose of maintaining or restoring an item to a status allowing it to execute the required function.

Maintenance has the following main objectives:

 Productive Objective – Guarantee the availability of Plants and Equipment to Production, so that they can perform their services under the best conditions, in terms of efficiency, reliability and safety.

 Economic Objectives – Ensure that the services rendered is at minimum costs with the maximum of efficiency.

Opportunity Maintenance – Work carried where the timing is determined by other events that can either be predictable or not predictable, e.g key equipment failure or production shutdown.

Predictive Maintenance – Is the preventive maintenance carried out whenever the trend of one, or more operating parameters of an item of equipment shows an incipient failure. The Predictive Maintenance uses measuring or monitoring devices in order to identify conditions that require correction before a functional failure occurs. Typical condition monitoring techniques are vibration analysis, crack detection, thermography, pressure and temperature monitoring, oil analysis, etc.



 Using the inspection data gathered to accurately predict the allowable lapse time and point of expected equipment failure for initiation of corrective action prior to catastrophic failure.


                                                 Fig. 1: Bearing Conditions Monitoring

Fig.2. Stationary condition diagnostics and monitoring system typically consists of a personal computer or a diagnostic station connected to signal commutation and conditioning blocks and then vibration and rotation speed sensors. The number of channels and measurement points in such a system may be from a few ones up to several hundreds.



Technical Inspection

Technical inspections are those performed by highly skilled technical personnel using sophisticated monitoring equipment to gather, store and analyze equipment condition data for accurate predictions of lapse time before failure. This type of ECM is usually performed on an established frequency basis, except when special technical field analyses are requested by field maintenance or the daily practical ECM inspection group.


Fig 3: Plant Technical Inspector using monitoring equipment


Practical Inspections

Practical inspections are those performed by maintenance personnel with many years of field   experience using less technical monitoring equipment. Primarily, they apply their skills of looking at, listing to and feeling of equipment on established daily routes to spot potential problems and correct them. The practical ECM inspectors fill a very important void between the technical inspection frequencies by monitoring   every piece of equipment daily and provide a constant flow of equipment daily and provide flow of equipment conditions data.





                                      Fig 4: Experience equipment inspectors at work

                                                                                                                                                                    Plant Maintenance Program Development

Lubrication Program

The first and most important step in a successful PM/ECM program is lubrication. Plant lubrication program will prevent or solve approximately 60% of rotating equipment problems. Therefore, the lubrication program must be initiated and implemented as designed by the Lubrication Engineer.

Equipment Lists

Equipment lists are prepared from plant Material Station Reports (MSRs). Preparation of the equipment list for the PM/ECM program can vary depending upon the plant being a new facility, less than one year old, or an older plant having operated more than one year. Extreme care must be exercised to overloading the program with none PM/ECM items such as statutory  or pre-turnaround inspections. To ensure optimum program effectiveness, equipment list should be prepared using the following guidelines.

Equipment Lists for New Plants

v Select the top 20 pieces of equipment most critical to the continuity of plant operations.
v Select the top 20 pieces of equipment that experiences has dictated will require the most maintenance.
v Select the top 20 pieces of equipment that would result in the highest monetary loss should they fail.
v Then progress down the MSR list selecting equipment, again as outlined above, for the progress, considering frequencies, manpower a walked and remembering that every piece of equipment will be walked by everyday by the practical inspectors.

Equipment Lists for Old Plants

v Select the top 10 pieces of equipment most critical to continuity of plant operation.
v Select the top 10 pieces of equipment causing the most plant downtime or production loss.
v Then progress down the MSR list selecting equipment, as outlined above, for the next group of 10’s.

Equipment Classification

v Each piece of equipment is categorized or classified (pumps, motor, blowers, compressors), and is assigned a service number, which indicates the type equipment and its in-line process position.
v Finalized Equipment List should be reviewed and approved by the Maintenance Manager.

Inspection Frequencies

Using the finalized PM/ECM equipment lists, frequencies for both the technical and practical inspections are established. If equipment historical data is available, it is used to establish the frequencies (how often individual pieces of equipment are looked at). If historical data is not available (i.e., new plant) the frequencies are established maintenance and maintenance engineering personnel with experience and knowledge of similar plants and equipment. Frequencies will be set at either daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, depending upon the criticality of the equipment. Care must be exercised to avoid overloading available manpower, yet a full day’s activity should be planned for each inspection discipline. Also, consideration must be given to the equipment cost, spares inventory, installed spares and criticality to continuity of plant operation. Frequencies should be reviewed annually.


Inspection Routes


Inspection routes are established by actually walking through each unit, with the prepared equipment list and established frequencies, formulating the routes to avoid excessive travel by the Practical PM Inspectors, yet ensuring that all equipment is covered and walked by each day. The routes must be plotted on equipment layout drawing in order to train the inspectors. Inspection routes are not normally needed for the Technical Inspections since these activities are usually confined to certain pieces of critical equipment or dictated by request from the PM Maintenance Supervisor.

                                            Fig 5: Plants Inspection Routes 

Inspection Schedules


Workable area PM schedule / check sheets are prepared by calendar days based upon the number of pieces of equipment on each route and their inspection frequencies. Schedules are prepared as a balanced system to where the daily work load will be fairly consistent. The number of schedules per area / unit can vary from one to as many as fifteen with each schedule averaging four equipment list sheets.


Fig 6: Plant Maintenance Schedule

Inspection Calendar

PM calendars are designed into number of periods with an open block under each day of the week. The schedule numbers are entered in these blocks. The PM Inspector simply checks the day of the week and the schedule numbers therein, pulls the appropriate schedule from the file cabinet, providing that particular day’s inspection assignment. A calendar is prepared for each process unit, depending upon the size of the plant.


                                     Fig. 7: Equipment Maintenance Calendar











                                                                                                                                                                                         














                                 

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