Mechanical equipment reliability analysis of cement plant: case study

Reliability studies are an important part of planning, designing and utilizing steps of engineering systems because unpredicted maintenance and breakdowns are more costly and critical than predicted ones. In continuous production industries, like cement industry, maintenance operations are of high importance where the investigation into the number of breakdowns, the behavior of subsystems and equipment, and the reliability of systems influence accurate maintenance of them. The determination of systems or equipment's weaknesses and that of the subsequent failure of whole system are an objective of system reliability assessment. Utilization of a cement factory depends on the reliability of equipments, environment, and efficiency of maintenance, repairment, production, operating experiences, etc. This paper studied the mechanical breakdowns behavior caused by frequent failure equipment or sensitive equipment in Kordestan cement factory (3200 tons per day clinker production capacity). The critical equipment were selected and inspected based on their importance for production and downtime statistics. Statistical methods and software like minitab16 and easyfit 5.5 were used to predict the breakdown behavior of equipment and to measure their reliability in different periods of time. Based on the behavior of equipment and finding the cause of failures, an appropriate reliability centered maintenance (RCM) process can be designed and implemented for that equipment