Reliability Availability & Maintainability
Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) refers to a number of related, reliability based analytical techniques, aimed principally at establishing, improving or optimising operational performance and maintenance effectiveness. Reliability analysis is also a key element in support of Quantified Risk Analysis (QRA), in calculating the risk of failure of emergency systems.
Plant and Equipment Safety
RAM techniques are used extensively in support of establishing the adequacy of safety provisions for plant and equipment. This may be in support of a Safety Case for a new installation, or may be to establish the implications of modifications to an installation. These techniques are necessary for the specification and verification of performance standards.
Asset Protection and Availability/ Reliability
With the very high capital costs of plant and equipment, together with the high operating performance demanded in competitive markets, it is imperative that the plant or equipment delivers its design performance at the required availability profile. RAM techniques can be readily applied to these situations, to identify where problem areas exist, and to assist in the identification of appropriate measures that will strike an effective balance between protection of assets, avoiding unexpected and unintended outages and meeting production availability targets.
Maintainability
Maintainability is the ease with which maintenance can be undertaken. Much of this relates to implementation-specific aspects, spares location, logistics, skill levels required, special tools, isolation of services, etc. Vectra can provide a range of services to support assessment of maintainability, including estimation of probabilities that specific maintenance actions will be achieved according to requirements. Perhaps the most useful service is to develop realistic maintenance task times with Clients, and include these on worksheets that allow total mean maintenance times to be estimated. This information is then linked to appropriate availability models. Additionally, Vectra can determine appropriate maintenance fractiles from these task times, which are frequently used to assess compliance with contracts, such as “95% of all maintenance tasks must not exceed 2 hours”, etc.
Maintenance Strategy Planning
RAM techniques provide vital information necessary for effective maintenance strategy planning. This derives from the intrinsic link between the reliability of an item of equipment and the preventive and corrective maintenance applied to it. Vectra has developed an effective approach to the development of maintenance strategies, based on applied RAM techniques and RCM (Reliability Centred Maintenance) methods. This approach to the optimisation of Maintenance Plans can deliver significant cost savings in terms of man-hour expenditure and sparing requirements.
Inspection Strategy Planning
Risk based methodologies enable targeting of inspection activities to those areas where they will have the most impact in reducing risk exposure. The optimization of inspection plans using a rigorous assessment of the active degradation mechanisms and associated consequences will ensure that the right inspection techniques are used in each location, and can result in significant reduction in inspection costs in certain circumstances. Our knowledge of inspection techniques, particularly non-intrusive techniques can help to ensure that the inspection plans we develop have a minimal impact on plant availability and production levels. |