Computer Aided Analysis of Rotating Equipment Availability in Petrochemical Carbon Black Plant

Abstract

High availability of industrial plant could only be achieved by adopting best global maintenance practices (computer software). In this research work, a software module was developed using programming tools such as Visual Basic (V.B) 6.0, Structured Query Language (SQL) and Microsoft Access. Operational data were collected from Warri Refinery and Petrochemical Company and was input into the developed software to analyze the plant availability. The performance test results obtained by the software for a five year period (2009-2013) showed that the software developed is consistently close to 100% accuracy. The output result indicates that the plant availability in 2009 is 9.59%; 2010 is 5.75%; 2011 is 7.12%; 2012 is 1.64% and 2013 is 6.30%. This highly fluctuating and low availability of raw material, inadequate maintenance strategies, aging plant and equipment, lack of spare parts stock for preventive and corrective maintenance for emergency, lack of standby (backup) equipment and utility constraints. It was observed that the aforementioned reasons invariably resulted to constant failure of plant availability could greatly be improved by adopting best global maintenance practices which include the deployment of appropriate software tools.