Reliable Plant 2012 Conference and Exhibition

Preventing Equipment Failures with Condition Based Maintenance Tools

Rendela Wenzel, Consultant Reliability Engineer, Eli Lilly and Company

In this session, you'll learn how to combine the use of oil, vibration, and thermographic analysis to prevent equipment failures. Correlating these technologies provides an even greater confidence when communicating to management when an asset is approaching an impending failure. This type of approach, referred to as the "2 out of 3 technology rule", will give a confidence of 95% or greater to the Reliability Engineer when asking to take an asset out of production to do the necessary maintenance. You'll also learn how to create a "Bomb Report" which the presenter uses to effectively convince management to take the asset out of service without "data overload".

A Holistic Approach to Assessing the Condition of Process Machinery

Robert Perez, Staff Reliability Engineer, Enterprise Products

One of the most challenging aspects of a machinery professional's job is deciding whether to shut down an operating machine due to a perceived problem or allow it to keep operating. If he is wrong, the remaining machine life is wasted, but if he is right, he can prevent his organization from experiencing undesirable consequences, such as product releases, fires, costly secondary machine damage, etc.  This economic balancing act is at the heart of all machinery assessments. In this session you will learn a logical and holistic 8-step approach to assessing process machines in the field that will help you make cost effective operational decisions and develop a more complete picture of machine condition.

Pump Performance Curves: An Effective Reliability Tool

Larry Bachus, Bachus Co. Inc.

While vibration analysis and oil analysis can detect several different types of pump problems, many pump vibrations and other issues are mysterious and go undetermined. In this session you'll learn how using the pump performance curve, to indicate if lube degeneration and heat is due to incorrect pump maintenance, improper pump operation, or inadequate pipe and system design. You'll learn how this forgotten and abandoned tool of reliability can be used to differentiate maintenance-induced premature failure, from operation-induced premature failure, from design-induced premature failure and reduce unplanned maintenance on rotating equipment.

Improving OEE Using "Honky-Tonk" to Reduce Costs and Increase Throughput

Riad Ardahji, Div. Director of Engineering, Reliability & Lean Services, Leggett & Platt

If a machine is running at sub-optimal reliability, the entire supply chain is wasting resources, materials, with a negative impact on profitability. Honky-Tonk is an adaptation of the Jidoka principles to include machine maintenance activities to maintain higher OEE levels. When a certain condition is detected by the machine, the Honky-Tonk device plays an audio-visual signal to alert the operator in advance of the condition before machine stops fully. Attend this session and learn how to use this innovative concept to reduce maintenance and supervisory costs and empower operators to rectify problems immediately.

How to Introduce a New Reliability Program

Paul Bonorden, Reliability Engineer, INVISTA

This presentation will discuss the various items that a company needs to consider before implementing a new reliability program. There are many different justification and benefits that you can use to sell a program other than the data that you get from your CMMS. The benefits of a program can come from non-traditional sources. This session will discuss many different topics that INVISTA addressed not only to start a reliability program but to instill a reliability culture. This is a reflective view of a lubrication program that was successfully instituted by INVISTA in Victoria, TX but is applicable to any new initiative.

Thermal Growth and Machinery Alignment

Pedro Casanova, Senior Application Engineer, LUDECA Inc.

Thermal growth is a very common occurrence in rotating equipment affecting not only the alignment of equipment but vibration. In this session, you'll learn about the effects of thermal growth and how to deal with its effects on machinery.

The Path to Maintenance Excellence

Wayne Vaughn, Vesta Partners

Many times people want to improve their maintenance operations but either don't know where to start or chose to start in areas that have either a low ROI or are not sustainable because they are not built on basic maintenance work processes that are performing well. In this session, you'll learn how to make these early decisions, how to proceed with a project, and see what success will look like. You'll learn several approaches to doing a basic assessment of where you are in maintenance performance and which areas offer the highest ROI for the organization. After the session, you'll be better equipped to prioritize what needs to be done and build a business case to get the necessary resources approved.

The Key to Improving Your Availability is FRACAS

James Taylor, Machinery Management Solutions, Inc.

Before you can make meaningful improvements to equipment reliability and availability, you have to collect all the pertinent information in a manner that makes it available for analysis. Part of the problem is capturing it from the trades, part is in capturing it in real time, and part is capturing it in a useable format. You then have to analyze that data to find a way to keep the event from happening again. In this session, you will see how to take a problem step-by-step from event initiation through solution implementation and learn simple ways to improve data capture, how to store it, and how to use it. You'll learn a simple, step-by-step method of failure analysis and management, how to collect good data about your failures, analyze the data to find out what caused the failure, develop a solution that will prevent the failure from reoccurring, develop a procedure to apply the solution, and how to implement the procedure.

Implementing Operator Maintenance

John Crossan, John Crossan Consulting

Most management tends to believe that implementing operator maintenance is largely an operator acceptance issue, but it really has more to do with the culture of the organization, which is largely driven by plant leadership. In this session you'll learn how to educate plant leadership in the benefits and key aspects of operator maintenance, and implement routine mechanisms that can change plant culture by building on operator maintenance to allow the plant to improve reliability and realize more of the potential of all employees.

Maintenance Master Planning

Mike Greenholtz, Genesis Solutions

In this session you'll learn how to develop and implement a Maintenance Master Plan to achieve sustainable best-in-class performance levels for proactive maintenance resulting in significant OEE improvements on targeted equipment as well as improvements in "right first time quality" metrics. You will gain a greater understanding of a progressive, multiphase Maintenance Master Plan and how to leverage your CMMS investment to support reliability strategy.

When Decibels Isn't Enough

Jim Hall, Ultra-Sound Technologies Training Systems (USTTS)

Airborne or stuctureborne inspection of motor bearings typically requires baseline decibel readings to trend bearings for condition. With ultrasound being the earliest of warnings before vibration and heat, it can be very subjective to diagnose a condition until much later in the trend. Today's ultrasound technicians have options that can address a condition early-on such as an inner or outer race problem through waveform analysis. Spectra Analysis software built for ultrasound inspections can reveal a condition at first read by displaying an FFT or Time Waveform condition or fault during an initial inspection. In this session you will see video of the inspection utilizing an ultrasound instrument with FFT and Time Waveform clearly revealing an "inner-race fault with sidebands" on the initial read of a newly installed pump motor bearing.

Tools and Techniques for Understanding Chloride Stress Corrosion Cracking

Greg Henson, Consultant Engineer-Reliability, Eli Lilly and Company

The phenomenon of chloride stress corrosion cracking is a significant problem for many companies.  Elanco, a division of Eli Lilly and Company, has fallen victim to this cracking in its fermentation vessels. Through these experiences, the site improved its understanding of chloride stress corrosion cracking. Using process and equipment data analysis, the site has created statistical models to predict and prioritize repair. Predictive tools have also been established to monitor and detect potential failures. In this session you'll learn the methods used to evaluate the sides of the stress corrosion triangle and various ways of monitoring and minimizing the effects of chloride stress corrosion cracking.  The use of actual test data and statistical analysis that aided in predicting failures and the methods of repair will also be explained.

Cloud Computing - Another Buzzword or Leveraging Technology?

Randy Johnson, Azima DLI

Companies of all shapes and sizes are taking advantage of the cost and operational benefits of cloud computing, but many predictive maintenance professionals are lagging behind as they don't understand what it is or how it can help support operational goals. In this session you'll learn how cloud computing can improve the efficiency, uptime and transparency of maintenance operations. Applications within the maintenance industry and industry case studies will be presented.

Rolling Element Bearing Fault Detection Techniques

Jason Tranter, Mobius Institute

Many people have been told about bearing vibration and they know how important it is to detect the fault conditions. But most do not understand why the vibration changes the way it does, or how spectrum analysis, waveform analysis and high frequency techniques combine together to give the clearest picture of bearing condition. In this session, you'll learn what the key bearing frequencies are, why we use high frequency bearing fault detection techniques, how to determine the approximate time until the bearing will fail, how to detect bearing faults even if you don't know which bearings are in the machine, and why it is important to open and inspect the bearing when it is removed from the machine.

TPM Implementation Considering Organizational Culture

George Péczely, A.A. Stádium Ltd.

The implementation process of TPM is fairly well defined. Thousands of companies can be found successful with TPM, but there are also many that can't achieve good results. Why? We might enumerate a huge amount of reasons, like the support from the top management was missing, or workers did not agree etc. But if we take a closer look, we will see that all of this comes from the organizational culture, "the way we do things here". How does the organizational culture affect the TPM implementation, and where the emphasis should be put on during the implementation depending on the type of the culture? The session shows the results of research aiming to find connection between the success of TPM implementation and organizational culture. It describes the basic contexts and gives advice on how to guide the implementation in different implementation phases.

Going Deep to Prevent Catastrophic Failure in a Platinum Mine

Noah Bethel, PdMA Corporation

5900 feet below the surface, deep in the shaft of a platinum mine, is not the ideal place for a catastrophic motor failure. Especially when the application controls water from flooding the mine shafts. There are those who assume that preventive motor maintenance is the best protective strategy for preventing motor failure and costly downtime. However, a South African mining company has found predictive maintenance to be a better alternative—and with good reason. The company was able to save thousands of dollars that it would have had to spend on repairs, resulting from an imminent and potentially catastrophic motor failure.

Reliability is a Mindset

Eyad Al-Basrawi, Reliability Unit Supervisor, Saudi Aramco

Total plant reliability is not a function by definition. It is a mindset and holistic approach that needs contribution from management, operators, technicians, engineers, even vendor and suppliers. This session will shed light on the reliability concept and the need for a paradigm shift. You'll hear success stories in promoting a reliability culture, realizing improvements in asset reliability and the work processes that led to major savings. Don't miss this opportunity to learn reliability practices from a leading reliability professional in the world's largest fractionation plant.

The VFD Story: Hidden Damage of Shaft Currents

Dwight Vicars, Inpro-Seal LLC

The increased use of VFD drives to save energy is causing increased cases of premature bearing failures in motors, pumps, and bearing blocks. This increase in failures is mainly due to shaft currents created by use of the VFD drives. In this session you'll learn whey VFDs cause bearing failures, how to determine if any of your motors have an issue, the pros and cons of available solutions, and how to prevent future failures.

Solution for Monitoring Low RPM Bearings

Patrick Parvin, SPM Instrument

Low RPM applications have been notoriously difficult to monitor with traditional vibration-based techniques. The energy involved at RPMs below 50 is very low, making it a difficult task to extract meaningful information from the measured signal. Early failure detection is vital to maximizing equipment life and effectiveness. Estimating the remaining lifetime of a component and knowing when is the right time for repair is difficult at best. In this session, advanced Shock Pulse Method technology utilizing High Definition algorithms to filter out irrelevant signals, and how they can be used on all types of machinery with the ability to measure in the 1 to 20,000 RPM range will be discussed. Two case studies will be presented with real time results on machinery running at low speeds.