The total time to pull the suction strainer, remove the blanket, and get the pump back in service was less than an hour, though that process alone cost approximately $50,000 in production losses. Still, had the vibration change gone undetected, losses would have been much larger. The oil company estimated based on similar events that had occurred that continued operation of the pump under starved suction conditions would have eventually resulted in a failure requiring at least seven days of downtime and parts replacement/reassembly costs totaling around $630,000.
“If you let a problem like this run for a period of time, you can end up with major equipment damage,” Herr says. “By catching it earlier, you save the cost of equipment repair and extended unplanned downtime for the entire unit.”
Condition monitoring doesn’t necessarily mean having to have a bunch of data experts on your in-house team or having to collect and store so much data that you’re drowning in metrics, notes Josh Lyon, Flowserve senior manager of marketing and technology. As a plant’s assets become better connected via the Industrial Internet and product vendors turn their attention to offering after-market monitoring services, expertise about operation of a particular piece of equipment doesn’t have to rely exclusively with the plant’s in-house staff.
Flowserve offers customers different escalation options with respect to vibration alarms, for example. Some companies prefer to keep escalation in house, with managers receiving an automatic alert if a specified amount of time passes without action by a technician to address an alarm. Other companies have alerts sent directly to Flowserve because they don’t want to receive notifications – just answers.
Critical to enabling the condition-monitoring platform for Flowserve was the partnership with OSIsoft, which is working with Flowserve and other original equipment manufacturers to expand after-market service offerings as vendors shift from selling physical products alone to selling products, performance analysis, and troubleshooting assistance. And as end users expand their partnerships with infrastructure experts, there’s opportunity for unprecedented collaboration and validation among data software providers, OEMs, and end users. That’s why, with respect to asset/product performance data on either the OEM side or the end-user side, “You have to get over the phobia of opening some of that data up,” says Enrique Herrera, market principal at OSIsoft.
Says Flowserve’s Lyon: “We’re getting to that point with the Industrial Internet and Big Data analytics of (customers) saying, ‘I don’t want to know what’s going on with 40 pieces of equipment that are running well. (They say) ‘I want to walk right past them, and I want my people to concentrate on the one or four pieces of equipment that aren’t running well ... I want to devote my resources and energy and time on the ones that aren’t performing well so I can prevent them from failing.”
Herr echoes the comment. “You need to be able to sift through (the data) and identify the critical things that are happening,” he says. “The ability to forecast potential failures ... that’s where the industry’s going. The loss of production can be astronomical in terms of cost.”
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