When the business scenario is global and the market is very competitive, the Indian industry has to reap the maximum revenue from its existing plants and machinery. Therefore, the key to survival in such a situation lies in enhancing the reliability and availability of the equipment through implementing the latest tools, techniques and best practices of reliability improvement.

This session will present a process industry case study from a large integrated steel plant that involves reliability prediction, identifying defect-prone areas and recommending corrective actions in order to enhance reliability. The study has been carried out using the most reputed software, RGA 6 PRO, and the NHPP model. For the reliability improvement tasks, FMECA is carried out. The failure pattern of the electric arc furnace hydraulic system of a steel melting shop has been studied and, using the best fitting distribution, the reliability and the MTBF were calculated. Taking corrective actions on the critical parts, improvements in system reliability and MTBF were observed.

This presentation demonstrates the thought process for how process industry cases can be studied effectively using ReliaSoft software (widely used in the aerospace, automotive and other engineering industries worldwide). Normally, the process equipment MTBF calculation is based on past failure data and not projected correctly due to avoidance of the nature of the failure pattern. Moreover, there is rarely a distinction between repairable systems (industrial equipment) and non-repairable systems.