PREDICTING THE RELIABILITY OF A REPAIRABLE SYSTEM WITH COMPETING FAILURE MODES

• Main Author: WONG, WAI KIT
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS 2009
• Subjects: TJ Mechanical engineering and machinery
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/9108/1/2009%20-%20Pre-Design%20Latent%20Heat%20Thermal%20Energy%20Storage%20using%20Electricity%20from%20the%20Grid.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/9108/
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Petronas

Virtually all of the systems are bound to failure upon usage for certain duration, and these systems can be categorized as repairable and non-repairable system. Repairable system is one, which can be restored to get back to work fully by any action such as parts replacements or changes to adjustable settings other than replacement of the entire system. While non-repairable system is one, which cannot or not cost effective to be repaired, such as the microprocessor, light bulb. In this project, research on the reliability of repairable system was focused, as most of the machines/systems in the industry field are complex and made from several to millions of parts. The main objective of this project is to analyze the failure data of centrifugal pumps that were provided by a petrochemical plant and to develop a reliability model to predict the failure occurrences for each failure modes. With accurate failure prediction, the plant will be able to schedule preventive maintenance accurately and thus avoiding the costly corrective maintenance. Failure data of centrifugal pumps was collected and segregation was done to narrow the scope of study. Weibull parameters, cumulative number of failures, MTBF, etc for each failure were analyzed by using Weibull++ 7, while the reliability of the pumpsystem was modeled by analytical analyses and simulations using BlockSim 7. The centrifugal pumps from the plant are predicted to have an average MTBF of 2.81 years. In conclusion, accurate failure prediction on centrifugal pump is critical so that appropriate actions can be taken to utilize the components folly and most importantly,minimized the chance ofbreak down ofthe pump.