A chemical plant is an industrial process plant that manufactures (or otherwise processes) chemicals, usually on a large scale .

In addition to feeding and operating the plant, and packaging or preparing the product for shipping, plant workers are needed for taking samples for routine and troubleshooting analysis and for performing maintenance. chemical plant mantaince has two main forms 1) Preventive maintenance 2) Predictive mantainence Routine maintenance can include periodic inspections and replacement of worn catalyst, analyzer reagents, various sensors, or mechanical parts. Non-routine maintenance can include investigating problems and then fixing them, such as leaks, failure to meet feed or product specifications, mechanical failures of valves, pumps, compressors, sensors, etc.

PREVENTIVE MANAINENCE :
Preventive maintenance (PM) has the following meanings: 1) The care and servicing by personnel for the purpose of maintaining equipment and facilities in satisfactory operating condition by providing for systematic inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures either before they occur or before they develop into major defects. 2) Maintenance, including tests, measurements, adjustments, and parts replacement, performed specifically to prevent faults from occurring. The primary goal of maintenance is to avoid or mitigate the consequences of failure of equipment. This may be by preventing the failure before it actually occurs which Planned Maintenance and Condition Based Maintenance help to achieve. It is designed to preserve and restore equipment reliability by replacing worn components before they actually fail. Preventive maintenance activities include partial or complete overhauls at specified periods, oil changes, lubrication and so on. In addition, workers can record equipment deterioration so they know to replace or repair worn parts before they cause system failure. The ideal preventive maintenance program would prevent all equipment failure before it occurs. There is a controversy of sorts regarding the propriety of the usage preventative. Preventive maintenance can be described as maintenance of equipment or systems before fault occurs. It can be divided into two subgroups: 1) 2) planned maintenance and condition-based maintenance.

The main difference of subgroups is determination of maintenance time, or determination of moment when maintenance should be performed. While preventive maintenance is generally considered to be worthwhile, there are risks such as equipment failure or human error involved when performing preventive maintenance, just as in any maintenance operation. Preventive maintenance as scheduled overhaul or scheduled replacement provides two of the three proactive failure management policies available to the maintenance engineer. Common methods of determining what Preventive (or other) failure management policies should be applied are; OEM recommendations, requirements of codes and legislation within a jurisdiction, what an "expert" thinks ought to be done, or the maintenance that's already done to similar equipment, and most important measured values and performance indications.

In a nutshell: Preventive maintenance is conducted to keep equipment working and/or extend the life of the equipment. Corrective maintenance, sometimes called "repair," is conducted to get equipment working again. PLANNED MANTAINENCE Planned Preventive Maintenance ('PPM') or more usual just simple Planned Maintenance (PM) or Scheduled Maintenance is any variety of scheduled maintenance to an object or item of equipment. Specifically, Planned Maintenance is a scheduled service visit carried out by a competent and suitable agent, to ensure that an item of equipment is operating correctly and to therefore avoid any unscheduled breakdown and downtime.[1] Together with Condition Based Maintenance, Planned maintenance comprises preventive maintenance, in which the maintenance event is preplanned, and all future maintenance is preprogrammed. Planned maintenance is created for every item separately according to manufacturers recommendation or legislation. Plan can be based on equipment running hours, date based, or for vehicles distance travelled. A good example of a planned maintenance program is car maintenance, where time and distance determine fluid change requirements. A good example of Condition Based Maintenance is the oil pressure warning light that provides notification that you should stop the vehicle because failure will occur because engine lubrication has stopped. Planned maintenance has some advantages over Condition Based Maintenance such as: easier planning of maintenance and ordering spares, costs are distributed more evenly, no initial costs for instruments for supervision of equipment. Disadvantages are: less reliable than equipment with fault reporting associated with CBM more expensive due to more frequent parts change. requires training investment and ongoing labor costs Parts that have scheduled maintenance at fixed intervals, usually due to wearout or a fixed shelf life, are sometimes known as time-change interval, or TCI items. CONDITION BASED MANTAINENCE : Condition-based maintenance (CBM), shortly described, is maintenance when need arises. This maintenance is performed after one or more indicators show that equipment is going to fail or that equipment performance is deteriorating. This concept is applicable to mission critical systems that incorporate active redundancy and fault reporting. It is also applicable to non-mission critical systems that lack redundancy and fault reporting. Condition-based maintenance was introduced to try to maintain the correct equipment at the right time. CBM is based on using real-time data to prioritize and optimize maintenance resources. Observing the state of the system is known as condition monitoring. Such a system will determine the equipment's health, and act only when maintenance is actually necessary. Developments in recent years have allowed extensive instrumentation of equipment, and together with better tools for analyzing condition data, the maintenance personnel of today are more than ever able to

decide what is the right time to perform maintenance on some piece of equipment. Ideally condition-based maintenance will allow the maintenance personnel to do only the right things, minimizing spare parts cost, system downtime and time spent on maintenance. RELATED CHALENGES Despite its usefulness, there are several challenges to the use of CBM. First and most important of all, the initial cost of CBM is high. It requires improved instrumentation of the equipment. Often the cost of sufficient instruments can be quite large, especially on equipment that is already installed. Therefore, it is important for the installer to decide the importance of the investment before adding CBM to all equipment. A result of this cost is that the first generation of CBM in the oil and gas industry has only focused on vibration in heavy rotating equipment . Secondly, introducing CBM will invoke a major change in how maintenance is performed, and potentially to the whole maintenance organization in a company. Organizational changes are in general difficult. Also, the technical side of it is not always as simple. Even if some types of equipment can easily be observed by measuring simple values as vibration (displacement or acceleration), temperature or pressure, it is not trivial to turn this measured data into actionable knowledge about health of the equipment. VALUE POTIENTIAL As systems get more costly, and instrumentation and information systems tend to become cheaper and more reliable, CBM becomes an important tool for running a plant or factory in an optimal manner. Better operations will lead to lower production cost and lower use of resources. And lower use of resources may be one of the most important differentiators in a future where environmental issues become more important by the day. A more down to earth scenario where value can be created is by monitoring the health of your car motor. Rather than changing parts at predefined intervals, the car itself can tell you when something needs to be changed based on cheap and simple instrumentation. ADVANTAGES AND DRAWBACKS : CBM has some advantages over planned maintenance: Improved system reliability Decreased maintenance costs Decreased number of maintenance operations causes a reduction of human error influences Its disadvantages are: High installation costs, for minor equipment items often more than the value of the equipment Unpredictable maintenance periods cause costs to be divided unequally Increased number of parts (the CBM installation itself) that need maintenance and checking Today, due to its costs, CBM is not used for less important parts of machinery despite obvious advantages. However it can be found everywhere where increased reliability and safety is required, and in future will be applied even more widely.

PREDICTIVE MANTAINENCE :
Predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques help determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to predict when maintenance should be performed. This approach offers cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when

warranted. The main value of Predicted Maintenance is to allow convenient scheduling of corrective maintenance, and to prevent unexpected equipment failures. The key is "the right information in the right time". By knowing which equipment needs maintenance, maintenance work can be better planned (spare parts, people etc.) and what would have been "unplanned stops" are transformed to shorter and fewer "planned stops", thus increasing plant availability. Other advantages include increased equipment lifetime, increased plant safety, fewer accidents with negative impact on environment, and optimised spare parts handling. PdM, or condition-based maintenance, attempts to evaluate the condition of equipment by performing periodic or continuous (online) equipment condition monitoring. The ultimate goal of PdM is to perform maintenance at a scheduled point in time when the maintenance activity is most cost-effective and before the equipment loses performance within a threshold. This is in contrast to time- and/or operation count-based maintenance, where a piece of equipment gets maintained whether it needs it or not. Time-based maintenance is labor intensive, ineffective in identifying problems that develop between scheduled inspections, and is not cost-effective. The "predictive" component of predictive maintenance stems from the goal of predicting the future trend of the equipment's condition. This approach uses principles of statistical process control to determine at what point in the future maintenance activities will be appropriate. Most PdM inspections are performed while equipment is in service, thereby minimizing disruption of normal system operations. Adoption of PdM can result in substantial cost savings and higher system reliability. Reliability-centered maintenance, or RCM, emphasizes the use of predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques in addition to traditional preventive measures. When properly implemented, RCM provides companies with a tool for achieving lowest asset Net Present Costs (NPC) for a given level of performance and risk.[1] One area that many times is overlooked is how to, in an efficient way, transfer the PdM data to a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) system so that the equipment condition data is sent to the right equipment object in the CMMS system in order to trigger maintenace planning, execution and reporting. Unless this is achieved, the PdM solution is of limited value, at least if the PdM solution is implemented on a medium to large size plant with tens of thousands pieces of equipment. In 2010, the mining company Boliden, as a first, implemented a combined Distributed Control System (DCS) and Pdm solution integrated with the plant CMMS system on an object to object level, transferring equipment data using protocols like Highway Addressable Remote Transducer Protocol (HART), IEC61850 and OLE for process control (OPC). TECHNOLOGIES : To evaluate equipment condition, predictive maintenance utilizes nondestructive testing technologies such as infrared, acoustic (partial discharge and airborne ultrasonic), corona detection, vibration analysis, sound level measurements, oil analysis, and other specific online tests. New methods in this area is to utilize measurements on the actual equipment in combination with measurement of process performance, measured by other devices, to trigger maintenance conditions. This is primarily available in Collaborative Process Automation Systems(CPAS). Site measurements are often supported by wireless sensor networks to reduce the wiring cost. Vibration analysis is most productive on high-speed rotating equipment and can be the most expensive component of a PdM program to get up and running. Vibration analysis, when properly done, allows the user to evaluate the condition of equipment and avoid failures. The latest generation of vibration analyzers comprises more capabilities and automated functions than its

predecessors. Many units display the full vibration spectrum of three axes simultaneously, providing a snapshot of what is going on with a particular machine. But despite such capabilities, not even the most sophisticated equipment successfully predicts developing problems unless the operator understands and applies the basics of vibration analysis.[2] Acoustical analysis can be done on a sonic or ultrasonic level. New ultrasonic techniques for condition monitoring make it possible to hear friction and stress in rotating machinery, which can predict deterioration earlier than conventional techniques.[3] Ultrasonic technology is sensitive to high-frequency sounds that are inaudible to the human ear and distinguishes them from lowerfrequency sounds and mechanical vibration. Machine friction and stress waves produce distinctive sounds in the upper ultrasonic range. Changes in these friction and stress waves can suggest deteriorating conditions much earlier than technologies such as vibration or oil analysis. With proper ultrasonic measurement and analysis, its possible to differentiate normal wear from abnormal wear, physical damage, imbalance conditions, and lubrication problems based on a direct relationship between asset and operating conditions. Sonic monitoring equipment is less expensive, but it also has fewer uses than ultrasonic technologies. Sonic technology is useful only on mechanical equipment, while ultrasonic equipment can detect electrical problems and is more flexible and reliable in detecting mechanical problems. Infrared monitoring and analysis has the widest range of application (from high- to low-speed equipment), and it can be effective for spotting both mechanical and electrical failures; some consider it to currently be the most cost-effective technology. Oil analysis is a long-term program that, where relevant, can eventually be more predictive than any of the other technologies. It can take years for a plant's oil program to reach this level of sophistication and effectiveness. Analytical techniques performed on oil samples can be classified in two categories: used oil analysis and wear particle analysis. Used oil analysis determines the condition of the lubricant itself, determines the quality of the lubricant, and checks its suitability for continued use. Wear particle analysis determines the mechanical condition of machine components that are lubricated. Through wear particle analysis, you can identify the composition of the solid material present and evaluate particle type, size, concentration, distribution, and morphology . Difference Between Preventive and Predictive Maintenance Predictive maintenance tends to include direct measurement of the item. Example, an infrared picture of a circuit board to determine hot spots while Preventive Maintenance includes the evaluation of particles in suspension in a lubricant, sound and vibration analysis of a machine. Examples An individual bought a incandescent light bulb. The manufacturing company mentioned that the life span of the bulb is 3 years. Just before the 3 years, the individual decided to replace the bulb with a new one. This is called preventive maintenance. On the other hand, the individual has the opportunity to observe the bulb operation daily. After two years, the bulb starts flickering. The individual predicts at that time that the bulb is going to fail very soon and decides to change it for a new one. This is called predictive maintenance. The individual ignores the flickering bulb and only goes out to buy another replacement light bulb when the current one fails. This is called corrective maintenance.

MANTAINENCE SCHEDULING :
Scheduling is the function of coordinating all of the logistical issues around the issues regarding the execution phase of the work. Communication is key to successful maintenance scheduling - this involves everyone from the

Planner, Scheduler, Maintenance Supervisor, Craftsman, Storeroom personnel, Operations Superintendent, to the Operator who is responsible to have the equipment secure and ready for maintenance. Any breakdown in this communication diminishes the probability of success. The role of each stakeholder needs to be clearly identified - whats expected from them and what do they bring to the table: Planner - ensures the work is properly planned with trade requirements, stores material, direct purchase material, and specialty service(s) identified on the work order. Any safety concerns or requirements are documented, as is the description of the work to be carried out. Scheduler - ensures that the trades are available to conduct the work during the schedule duration. The Maintenance Supervisor attends to the specifics as to who-what-where-when. The Scheduler also ensures that the material and/or services are available. He also communicates this information with all concerned parties in Maintenance and Operations et al. Maintenance Supervisor - looks after the day-to-day activities comprised in the weekly schedule. He assigns his Technicians in a best-fit fashion to the various Work Orders. He also determines the trade availability for the week using a simple Excel Spreadsheet and forwards that on to the Scheduler. Craftsman - carries out the assigned work and communicates the results as well as any discrepancies in planning or scheduling of the work back to Maintenance for further analysis. Storeroom Personnel - notify Maintenance of receipt of goods and any deviation from the expected standards such as damaged packaging. This affords Maintenance an opportunity to job stage and inspect the material prior to executing the work order and then finding out it is damaged. Operations Superintendent - must be informed well in advance so that the equipment can be released to Maintenance. This individual is aware of production schedules and can determine the opportune time with Maintenance to release the equipment. Operator - is the person responsible for securing the equipment by performing the proper lockout and any block and bleed requirements as well as any vessel entry preparations such as purging and gas detection. Short daily scheduling meetings must be held to update the schedule and communicate deviations from the schedule. Planning and scheduling are crucial to maintenance management. Being proactive as opposed to reactive cannot be stressed enough. Doc Palmer, a noted authority in the area of Maintenance Scheduling, cites six points that comprise good scheduling principles. 1. Job plans providing number of persons required, lowest required craft skill level, craft work hours per skill, and job duration information are necessary for advanced scheduling. 2. Weekly and daily schedules must be adhered to as closely as possible. - Proper priorities must be placed on new work orders to prevent undue interruption of these schedules. 3. A Scheduler develops a one-week schedule for each crew based on craft hours available, forecast that shows highest skill available, job priorities, and information from the job plans. - Consideration is also made of multiple jobs on the same equipment or system and of proactive

and reactive work available 4. The one-week schedule assigns work for every available work hour. The Schedule allows for emergencies and high priority, reactive jobs by scheduling a significant amount of work on easily interrupted tasks. - Preference is given to completing higher priority work by under-utilizing available skill levels over completing lower priority work. 5. The crew supervisor develops a daily schedule one day in advance using current job progress, the one-week schedule and new high priority, reactive jobs as a guide. The crew supervisor matches personnel skills and tasks. - The crew supervisor handles the current days work and problem even to rescheduling the entire crew for emergencies. 6. Wrench time is the primary measure of work force efficiency and of planning and scheduling effectiveness. - Work that is planned before assignment reduces unnecessary delays during jobs and work that is scheduled reduces delays between jobs. - Schedule compliance is the measure of adherence to the one-week schedule and its effectiveness. ( Doc Palmer: Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook: McGraw-Hill: New York: 1999 Page 3.2)

IMPORTENT TERMINOLOGIES :
Corrective maintenance is a maintenance task performed to identify, isolate, and rectify a fault so that the failed equipment, machine, or system can be restored to an operational condition within the tolerances or limits established for in-service operations. Operational maintenance is the care and minor maintenance of equipment using procedures that do not require detailed technical knowledge of equipments or systems function and design. This category of operational maintenance normally consists of inspecting, cleaning, servicing, preserving, lubricating, and adjusting, as required. Such maintenance may also include minor parts replacement that does not require the person performing the work to have highly technical skills or to perform internal alignment. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is a process to ensure that assets continue to do what their users require in their present operating context VDM - Value Driven Maintenance is a maintenance management methodology. Prognostics is an engineering discipline focused on predicting the time at which a system or a component will no longer perform its intended function. Total productive maintenance (TPM) originated in Japan in 1971 as a method for improved machine availability through better utilization of maintenance and production resources.

FURTHER READING:

L.C.Morow: Maintenance Engineering Hand Book, Mc Graw Hill, Now York 1952 Wu, S. and Zuo, M.J. (2010). Linear and nonlinear preventive maintenance, IEEE Transactions on Reiability, Volume 59, No. 1, 2010, 242-249. Wood, Brian (2003). Building care. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-632-06049-8. Doc Palmer: Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook: McGraw-Hill: