HSE DS MUMBAI

In response to: Industry 4.0, Predictive Maintenance and Machine Learning: A Brief Introduction of the Use cases and Challenges in adoption.

The reliability 4.0 has been adopted by the maintenance departments of all the reputed industries world wide and I am glad to share a practical experiment done in our offshore platform which caused to save 35 crores directly from ONGC's exchequer.
The SH maintenance team, which is quickly adopting the evolutions in the world of asset management, recently cope with the RCM (reliability centred maintenance) principles which emphasises on optimisation of maintenance activities, by replacing only the impaired OFSA’s (Oil film seal assembly) in a gas compressor that clocked 2 lakh hours.

Change of culture:
Although the compressor crossed the recommended hours for overhaul, the SH maintenance team decided to analyse performance as well as condition of the compressor units. From this analysis, though OFSA’s were found to be failed, since the volumetric efficiency and rotor dynamic behaviour were identified as exceptionally superior as compared with compressors overhauled in recent years, the team took an appropriate decision to replace the seals rather than going for a complete overhaul.

Proactively eliminating the root cause:
When the symptoms of seal failure had been manifested, the untenability of the seals were confirmed with static tests, also a novel idea, in which the oil flows from the seals at static condition were measured while the compressors were charged to 7 Kg/cm2. With this simple procedure, among the four seals, the damaged seals were identified.

Focus on business goals:
Whilst the expenditure for a typical overhaul is around 36 crore, with this specific job, by spending just one crore, the performance of the compressor has been revived to its fullest. Apart from this, while a conventional overhaul takes 60 days to complete, this specific job has been caused outage of the unit for 10 days by saving 120 million normal m3 of gas.

Aligning with policy of organisation:
With depleting manpower, workload on the employees has to be diligently optimised with all possible ways. Such reliability centred maintenances would greatly reduce the burden on maintenance personnel, procurement department and logistics.