Assessing Pump Reliability: a Case Study of Port Harcourt Refinery

The goal of the maintenance optimization process is to select the appropriate maintenance technique for each piece of equipment within a system and identifying the periodicity that the maintenance technique should be conducted to achieve regulatory requirements, maintenance targets concerning safety, equipment reliability, system availability and costs. This paper presents a predictive maintenance model for a deteriorating system in a manufacturing industry. In the deterioration process the important parameters of the system gradually worsen, and if left unattended, the process leads to deterioration failure of the whole system. In this study we considered discrete stage deterioration, where the first stage is a good stage and the last stage is the failed stage. During the life period of a machine the breakdown in the system can be rectified by immediate corrective maintenance programmes and the deterioration of the system can be solved by proper preventive maintenance schedule. The corrective and preventive maintenances bring the manufacturing system into a good and new stage of operation. Using Reliability models, this study presents closed-form analytical solutions for the performance measures of the model. The study also presents the optimal model parameters that maximize the system availability. An optimal design of the condition based models is essential for getting a closed form solution.. A modified FMEA approach has been used to identify the possible tests. The developed method is suitable for application in abroad range of industries. This study analyzes the maintainability of centrifugal pumps in a petrochemical refinery complex in Nigeria by analyzing the failure behaviours and downtime patterns. The data collected from the refinery cover a three year operation period of the high capacity, continuous operation pumps. This work aimed at improving the failure rates of pumps in chemical plants. Three pumps, 16 PO2,16 PO3 and 14 PO2, were assessed after collecting data on them from the plant record history for three years i.e. from 2017 through 2019. Proper reliability models were applied and results obtained showed the performance of each of them.. The results are analyzed in tables and figures. It was observed that 16 PO3 has the highest failure rate, the highest annual failure time, the highest labour and expense, the highest material per repair, the highest annual cost. Keywords: Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Pump, Refinery, business continuity plan, plant data, cost.