This paper presents a structured risk-based failure assessment (RBFA) approach, which provides a complete solution to avoid repeated and potential failures to improve overall plant safety and availability. Technological advancements and high product demand have encouraged designers to design mega-capacity systems to enhance system utilization and improve revenues. However, these benefits make the systems more complex and thus prone to unnoticed failure. It is an overwhelming task to address all the failures due to the limited resources and time constraints. This leads to substandard and poor quality failure assessments, which cause repeated failures. To address this common industry concern, a four phase RBFA framework is proposed which is not limited to the identification of root cause(s) but also includes other actions such as failure monitoring. The four phases include the plan phase, the assessment phase, the analysis phase and the implementation-tracking phase. These phases cover identification of failure, failure analysis, root cause(s) analysis, and failure monitoring. In this paper, the applicability and advantages of the proposed approach are examined through two real case studies pertaining to bearing failure and drive coupling failure. By implementing the proposed approach, significant improvements have been experienced in the system availability in both the cases.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	plant availability, process plant safety, reliability, risk-based failure assessment, root cause, availability, product design, reliability, risk assessment, safety engineering, failure assessment, plant availability, potential failures, root cause
Research Division:	Engineering
Research Group:	Engineering practice and education
Research Field:	Risk engineering
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding knowledge in the environmental sciences
UTAS Author:	Khan, FI (Professor Faisal Khan)
ID Code:	120702
Year Published:	2014
Web of Science® Times Cited:	9
Deposited By:	NC Maritime Engineering and Hydrodynamics
Deposited On:	2017-08-30
Last Modified:	2017-11-06
Downloads:	0