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Track 2 Session 9
8:00 to 9:10 a.m. Friday April
13, 2007
Incorporating Reliability, Availability
and Maintainability (RAM) into Process Synthesis
In process industries when a new
process needs to be designed, the common approach is to find the
optimal design from a superstructure which embeds all feasible
options in respect to the objective of minimizing cost or maximizing
profit. In this approach, the reliability, availability and
maintainability (RAM) is studied after the flowsheet is fixed. It is
not uncommon that the optimal flowsheet found in the first step is
sub-optimal when considering RAM issues in the second step. The
business owner faces a difficult choice: to spend money on modifying
the fixed design as the result of the RAM study or to accept the
sub-optimal design reluctantly and produce products at a higher
cost. This presentation proposes a new approach that can design a
new process while considering the RAM issues simultaneously. The
optimization procedure can give the minimum cost or maximum profit,
and it avoids the profit loss due to an initial non reliability-wise
design.
Key Words: Optimisation,
Preventive Maintenance, Corrective Maintenance, Weibull Analysis,
Reliability, Availability
Qiying Yin
(Scarlett)
University of Manchester - Centre for Process Integration
United Kingdom |
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