Abstract
An advance in Maintenance Turnaround Management has been recently implemented successfully in Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), Kuwait since April 2009.
The purpose to adopt this strategy for KOC was based on lessons learned, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Risk Based Inspection (RBI) in order to optimize operation, maintenance and inspection resources and increase availability of production facility, improve KOC production capacity in addition to minimizing shutdown time.
The philosophy for its Planned Maintenance / Predictive Maintenance activities were evaluated and upgraded based on two major concepts of Risk Based Inspection (RBI) and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). Both assisted KOC to improve Turn around Preventive Maintenance duration phenomenally to become three weeks instead of four weeks.
The Risk Based Inspection (RBI) approach was developed by Inspection and Corrosion Team of KOC in order to mainly handle the stationery equipment like pressure vessels, heat exchangers, piping etc.
Due to this concept, Major Survey activity will be carried out once in eight years instead of four years which is being practiced now.
Also, Minor Survey which used to be carried out every two years will be totally eliminated based on the following findings/concepts:
Past experience revealed that there are no significant defects on Relief valves while testing every two years.
Cross over KOC we noticed that purchasing of 300 PSV’s valves will be sufficient to cater for 50% of PRV in GC’s.
Twinning of Relief valves system which will have a two relief valves on each system with independent isolation facility to overcome Shut down and to enable replacement of each valve independently.
On the other hand Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) approach is being developed by Maintenance Support & Reliability Team which is proven to be a methodology of analyzing assets and structuring the appropriate predictive and preventive maintenance tasks warranted by the assets criticality and failure modes/affects for rotating equipment.
The approach is defined mainly on criticality where:
Planned Maintenance is carried out for highly critical equipment.
Predictive Maintenance is carried out for the less critical equipment.
Break down maintenance for the least critical equipment.
