Improve industrial process plant safety & availability via reliability engineering

International Petrochemical, Chemical, Refining and Petroleum Industries are trying to implement reliability programs to improve plant safety while trying to maintain plant availability. These programs can vary significantly in size and complexity. Any kind of reliability program, like a preventive maintenance (PM) program, consists always of one or more reliability models and reliability data to execute these models. It is needless to say that the actual successful implementation and utilization of these reliability programs heavily depends on the accuracy of the reliability models and the availability of realistic data, or at least as close as possible data. The objective of this paper is to give the reader a better understanding of the importance of reliability engineering for the purpose of process availability, safety and preventive maintenance programs. The paper will first explain what reliability engineering is and why it is important for processing plants to have a reliability program followed with an overview of different programs in use by companies today (Preventive maintenance, risk based inspections, etc).