INSPECTION: A CRITICAL ELEMENT OF TURNAROUNDS, SHUTDOWNS AND OUTAGES

摘要

Within the process industry there are a great many companies that operate on a 24 hours a day, or continuous seven days a week basis. This makes conducting certain types of maintenance extremely difficult because the equipment cannot be taken out of service. Plants that operate in this fashion (i.e., on a predetermined cycle) conduct what are referred to as turnarounds, shutdowns or outages; different names for the same thing dependent on the industry in which you work. For the sake of simplicity let's call them outages. These outages occur on regular cycles, some of which can be as long as five years or more between events. The whole point behind these major events is to conduct equipment inspection, repair, catalyst change outs, and machine overhauls in a planned manner; restoring them to full functionality and enabling them to run for another cycle, safely and reliably. The frequency in which a planned outage occurs in a plant or process unit is very dependent on equipment condition as monitored during operation and the level of risk that a company is willing to take. Companies that don't properly schedule outages must recognize that if you don't take care of the equipment it will fail and shut down your process at the most inopportune time, i.e., unplanned outages. These unplanned failures result in lost production and profit as well many other potential problems.