Why Does New Equipment Fail?

Abstract

Abstract During investigation of equipment failure and deterioration of equipment the age of the equipment has been considered as a factor in problem being studied. The equipment being studied has been from many industries, but the majority of the work carried out was in Petrochemical facilities. The pattern which emerged from a study of two years (and over 200) investigations, revealed a pattern which revealed approximately 10% of equipment was less than 5 years old and over 20% was less than 10 years old. There is a great deal of focus on managing ageing process equipment in the petrochemical industry. The performance of "younger" equipment appears to be equally unreliable as 25 to 30 year old equipment, in terms of number of failures. Industry is perhaps suffering failure, at both ends of the operating life of a plant which could be mitigated or avoided. By integrating the reasons for failure, into the design, fabrication and operation of equipment there is an opportunity to improve the reliability of new plants. This paper has been prepared from data gained during detailed root cause analysis of equipment failure investigation. In order to manage the challenges of confidentiality of information, the results are described broad principals of the conditions which resulted in failure. These events are rarely the result of a single factor, therefore methods of restricting the potential for the combination of these circumstances are the key message. It may be that many people believe the situation is no worse now, than it has been in the past, but my experience over 30 plus years suggests it is now more serious. There appear to be more significant failures, leading to prolonged plant shutdown. It is likely improvements in safety management have controlled the consequences of these events, so they do not cause the level of "injury" observed historically. The business loss appears to be the major impact of failure. However, in the longer term, the integrity of equipment may not meet the expected statistical performance values, which are commonly used in risk based studies for inspection or process safety As the improvement in the financial climate for industry leads to many new plants being constructed, the importance of learning from experience and improving reliability represents a significant financial advantage. The data indicates achieving these benefits should involve all parts of the project process. This may not be simple to achieve, but the results are considered worthwhile. Some suggestions of how to achieve this objective are included in the conclusions.