Weibull reliability analysis and maintenance strategies of rotating equipment

In this thesis, Weibull reliability analysis have been applied to some rotating equipment in Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura Refinery. The Weibull reliability analysis is found to be very beneficial to characterize the equipment time to failure in rotating equipment, and to design their appropriate maintenance strategy by knowing the expected number of failures to occur in a given period of time. Through the use of fitted Weibull model as a predictive tool, the operation management can take the appropriate decision in advance to avoid any operational upset. The time-to-failure or time between failure data as well as the time to restore the system for a set of rotating equipment that is stored in Saudi Aramco computer maintenance systems will be utilized to perform both Weibull reliability and maintainability analysis. The data will be derived also from Saudi Aramco on-line monitoring process variables retrieved from Distributed Control System (DCS). After characterizing the reliability and maintainability functions, the steady-state availability of each type of rotating equipment is determined. The proper type of maintenance for each rotating equipment will be identified and the needs of spares for various non-repairable parts used in these equipment will also be determined for a known planning horizon.