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Case Study

Turnaround Extension Reliability Assessment.

The refinery wanted to investigate the feasibility of increasing profits by extending the time between turnarounds for a Fluid Cat Cracker from every 3 years to every 4 years.

Benefits

Following ProAIM’s work, the results were implemented and annualized average profitability of the refinery was increased by $2.5M USD per year, the annual maintenance costs was reduced by 17% per year for the FCC, and the proposed plans for retrofits to increase availability justified a shorter ROI than expected by one year.

Objectives

  • Study the feasibility & risks of extending the turnaround by one year, in terms of the reliability and availability of the static and rotating equipment
  • Review the current and planned maintenance schedule to ensure the plant could run for four years between shutdowns
  • Review the planned retrofits, in terms of the economic impact on the availability of the process
  • Create KPIs for assessing ongoing RAM performance
  • Create a failure data bank specific for the FCC unit
  • Optimize the spare parts inventory to ensure asset availability and utilization

Methodology

The first step in the project was to identify all the critical equipment that would affect the FCC’s availability. 300 individual items were reviewed, from which 78 static and 50 rotating pieces of equipment were identified as critical to the processes availability. Following this, all of the historical maintenance records for this equipment was collected from CMMS. This data was then screened and regressed to quantify failure modes to enable future performance to be predicted.

Using RAM-int, this information was then used to create simulation models to enable the proposed maintenance strategies to be evaluated, in terms of reliability, availability, and costs. The simulations included many of the key operational conditions to simulate reliability performance. These models also enabled ProAIM to economically assess the impact of various maintenance strategies to assess their costs on the effect of reliability.

Numerous process retrofit options were independently assessed to quantify the economics of the investment. Finally, the spare parts for the critical equipment were optimized to eliminate unplanned shutdowns due to a lack of spare parts, as many of these spare parts were shared throughout the facility.

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