Overview

Ask any plant manager in the world if he is interested in plant safety and he will answer in the affirmative. Ask him about his desire to produce reliably and he will probably give you the same answer. But interests and desires are not always aligned with a thoughtful and consistent implementation strategy and some of our readers will have to examine to what extent they are or are not in tune with Best-of-Class (BOC) practices.

Over the years, we have come to appreciate that reliability improvement and machinery uptime are virtual synonyms. To achieve uptime optimization, the machinery specification and actual design must be right. The machine must be operated within its design envelope. It must also be maintained correctly.

This harmonizes with the various editions of our text Machinery Failure Analysis and Troubleshooting (ISBN 0-88415-662-1) where we emphasize that, to capture high reliability, plant equipment has to be free of

• design defects

• fabrication deficiencies

• material defects

• assembly or installation flaws

• maintenance errors

• unintended operation

• operator error.

Indeed, and as we shall see, these seven failure categories are implicitly recognized whenever a facility is being planned and put into service. They are also recognized when performing failure analysis, because all failures of all machines will fit into one or more of these seven failure categories. It should be noted that the three major frames or boxes of Figure 1-1 contain these categories as well.

Figure 1-1: Elements contributing to machinery uptime.

But that is not...