OVERVIEW

The traditional concept of maintenance in the petrochemical industry has been undergoing a major change to ensure that equipment not only has the best availability but also is operating at its maximum efficiency. Throughout the world in the petrochemical industry, there is a consistent trend to improve maintenance strategy from fix-as-fail to total performance-based planned maintenance. In practice, this calls for on-line monitoring and condition management of all major equipment in the plant. To reach the Utopian goal of just-in-time maintenance with minor disruption in the operation of the plant requires a very close understanding of the thermodynamic and mechanical aspects of plant equipment.

The introduction of the total maintenance condition monitoring system means the use of composite condition monitoring systems, which combine both mechanical and performance based analysis. Numerous case studies have shown that many turbomachinery operational problems can only be diagnosed and resolved by correlating the representative performance parameters with mechanical parameters.

Major petrochemical complexes contain various types of large machinery. Examples include gas and steam turbines, pumps, and compressors, but also their effect on heat exchangers, distillation towers, and other major plant equipment. Thus, the logical trend in condition monitoring is to multi-machine train monitoring. To accomplish this goal, an extensive database that contains data from all machine trains, along with many composite multi-machine analysis algorithms, are implemented in a systematic and modular form in a central system.

Implementation of advanced performance degradation models necessitate the inclusion of advanced instrumentation and sensors, such as pyrometers for...