Investigation on Performance Reliability Improvement by Optimizing Maintenance Practices through Failure Analysis in Continuous Process Industry

Abstract

quotThere are certain possibilities of the performance reliability improvement through maintenance optimization of various systems or components of major process industries that run on continuous basis. Looking to the past business volume of 6.5 lac metric tons for aluminium wire and expected compound annual growth rate of 13.5 % during 2014-19 due to Government of India s power for all drive, an aluminium wire processing plant forms a noticeable sector of continuous process industry. The maintenance time is about 20 to 25 % of the total time which leads to reliability losses. Moreover, poor maintenance seems the prime reason of low productivity and profit. Such facts and challenges of keeping the system in ready-state motivate a definite maintenance plan to be modeled based on a live failure analysis to be executed during shutdown or scheduled period. The purpose of this research study is to investigate the extent at which the reliability of an aluminium wire rolling mill can be improved by ameliorating current control and maintenance practices. newline newlineThe deliverables are achieved by collecting the historical failure data i.e. downtime and failure frequencies; from April 2013 to March 2014 at Sampat aluminium private limited. Reliability modeling is done in a view to understand the failure pattern behaviour of the rolling machine. The critical components like; bearings, gears and machining shafts are discriminated based on these data and their functional failures, failure causes, effects and repercussions of failures with existing control and maintenance practices has been modeled based on live shop-floor study. Scores are assigned on 1 to 10 levels by analyzing attributes effects from lowest to highest concern respectively for every modes of failure through realistic brain-storming among maintenance team by incorporating some advanced attributes like; maintainability, economic safety, economic cost and spares with basic criteria in this study. The risk priority number (RPN) and maintainability criticality indices (M