Improving the reliability of a chemical process plant

M.Phil.In modern society, professional engineers, technologists and technical managers are responsible for the planning, design, manufacture, maintenance and operation of the processes and systems ranging from simple processes to complex systems. The failure of these can often cause effects that range from inconvenience and irritation to severe impact on the society and its environment. Users, customers and society in general expect that products be reliable and safe at all times (Allan & Ballinton 1992). The biggest investment in any plant is, arguably, on individual plant equipment. It is therefore reasonable to give the greatest attention possible to the health and integrity of equipment that form part of the chemical process plant.Most of plant failures occur without warning and this result in equipment breakdowns, huge production losses and expensive maintenance. The reaction to plant failures has, in most cases, been a reactive maintenance which means that the plant equipment must fail before the cause of fault is investigated and the equipment is repaired. Reactive maintenance has shortcomings in that it is successful in solving problems temporarily but does not guarantee prevention of fault recurrence. Equipment and process failures waste money on unreliability problems. The question that arises is. ‘How reliable and safe is the plant during its operating life?’ This question can be answered, in part, by the use of quantitative reliability evaluation. The growing need to achieve high availability for large integrated chemical process systems demands higher levels of reliability at the operational stage. Reliability is the probability of equipment or processes to function without failure when operated correctly for a given interval of time under stated conditions. This research dissertation is aimed at developing equipment optimisation program for the chemical process plant by introducing a logical approach to managing the maintenance of plant equipment. Some relevant reliability theory is discussed and applied to the Short – Path Distillation (SPD) plant of SASOL WAX. An analysis of the failure modes and criticality helps to identify plant equipment that needs special focus during inspection