FRAMEWORK FOR RELIABILITY, MAINTAINABILITY AND AVAILABILITY ANALYSIS OF GAS PROCESSING SYSTEM DURING OPERATION PHASE

In facing many operation challenges such as increased expectation in bottom line
performances and escalating overhead costs, petrochemical plants nowadays need to
continually strive for higher reliability and availability by means of effective
improvement tools. Reliability, maintainability and availability (RAM) analysis has
been recognised as one of the strategic tools to improve plant's reliability at operation
phase. Nevertheless, the application of RAM among industrial practitioners is still
limited generally due to the impracticality and complexity of existing approaches.
Hence, it is important to enhance the approaches so that they can be practically
applied by companies to assist them in achieving their operational goals.
The objectives of this research are to develop frameworks for applying reliability,
maintainability and availability analysis of gas processing system at operation phase
to improve system operational and maintenance performances. In addition, the study
focuses on ways to apply existing statistical approach and incorporate inputs from
field experts for prediction of reliability related measures. Furthermore, it explores
and highlights major issues involved in implementing RAM analysis in oil and gas
industry and offers viable solutions.
In this study, systematic analysis on each RAM components are proposed and
their roles as strategic improvement and decision making tools are discussed and
demonstrated using case studies of two plant systems. In reliability and
maintainability (R&M) analysis, two main steps; exploratory and inferential are
proposed. Tools such as Pareto, trend plot and hazard functions; Kaplan Meier (KM)
and proportional hazard model (PHM), are used in exploratory phase to identify
critical elements to system's R&M performances. In inferential analysis, a systematic
methodology is presented to assess R&M related measures.