ROTATING MACHINERY: MECHANICAL INTEGRITY AUDITS
Take Steps to Predict & Prevent Equipment Failures
Does your mechanical integrity program include maintenance templates for all your rotating machinery? Do you assess criticality? Preparing these specific maintenance items will help you develop an evergreen mechanical integrity (MI) strategy that will support improvements in operational safety, equipment reliability, and operational safety.
Our rotating equipment, vibration, and dynamics team delivers a two-part asset integrity strategy for rotating machinery and piping:
Proactive Maintenance
Our team applies vibration principles to your rotating machinery maintenance program to predict when a bearing or other component will fail. By following specific data collection and analysis steps, we will develop a predictive maintenance program to minimize equipment failures and increase the lifecycle of the machinery.
Preventative Maintenance
Rather than following traditional time-based inspection or maintenance schedules, we review current machine maintenance schedules to identify problems and repair bad actors before failure occurs.
Predictive Maintenance Program
Determine the criticality of each piece of rotating equipment at your facility by proactively accounting for process hazards, equipment failure, loss of production, and environmental impact. In collaboration with Equity’s mechanical integrity team, we will risk rank and prioritize your facility’s rotating machinery to develop an appropriate asset strategy.
Risk-Based Machinery Management
Factoring risk into managing rotating machinery will help establish best practices for equipment design, installation and commissioning, and operation and maintenance. With our knowledge of API RP 691 Risk-based Machinery Management, we help you refocus efforts onto the highest risk equipment, implement field risk assessments, and develop risk mitigation activities.
Based upon client specifications and operational requirements, we will:
- Evaluate and specify new machinery based on lifecycle costs
- Identify the correct materials and instrumentation
- Define machinery inspection and hold points
- Review packaging requirements of machinery to ensure ease of maintenance and operation
Preventative Maintenance Program
Diagnostics & Troubleshooting
An important part of a preventative maintenance program includes rotating equipment diagnostics and testing. During an onsite assessment, our expert team will conduct a vibration assessment to diagnosis issues, identify the bad actors, and develop practical troubleshooting steps to eliminate the issue.
Root Cause Failure Assessments
If there’s been an equipment failure at your facility, you need a team who can provide immediate answers, outline practical recommendations, and offer corrective solutions. We will identify what happened, why it happened, and present solutions to prevent future failures.
Using our team’s expertise with process simulation and fluid dynamics, we solve root cause problems for rotating equipment and piping vibration.
- Conduct a metallurgical failure analysis, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and finite element stress analysis (FEA)
- Predict acoustically-induced vibration (AIV) failures and provide remedial actions
- Conduct onsite interviews with personnel
- Collaborate with metallurgy and corrosion experts
Machinery Shop Inspections
Another step in establishing a strong predictive maintenance program is regular machinery shop inspections; however, many facilities have limited personnel available to oversee machinery shop inspections. We provide onsite services to support your inspection requirements, witness machinery testing, and provide recommendations for any identified damage, plus:
- Document the machinery tear down
- Identify, document, and explain observed wear and tear
- Recommend repair or replacement strategies
- Document and communicate tolerances and any changes
Recommended Reading
Rotating Equipment, Vibration, & Dynamics Expertise
Together with our unique and specialized mechanical engineering team, our rotating equipment engineers combine field testing with advanced stress and fluid mechanics analysis to diagnose, evaluate, and mitigate failure risks associated with the mechanical vibration, acoustic pulsation, and flow-induced forces in machinery, vessels, piping, and structures.
Our experts:
- Have 40+ years of combined field experience
- Are certified ISO VCAT-IV vibration analysts
- Are voting member of API 579 committee and develop standardized pipe vibration assessment methods
- Are members of API Sub-committee of Mechanical Equipment (SOME)
- Collaborate with fitness-for-service (FFS) and materials & corrosion experts to manage an asset’s lifecycle
