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Preface

Process industries are home to a huge number of machines, piping, structures, most of them critical to the industry’s mission. Failure of these items can cause loss of life, unscheduled shutdowns, increased maintenance and repair costs, and damaging litigation disputes. Experience shows that all too often, process machinery problems are never defined sufficiently; they are merely “solved” to “get back on stream.” Production pressures often override the need to analyze a situation thoroughly, and the problem and its underlying cause come back and haunt us later. Equipment downtime and component failure risk can be reduced only if potential problems are anticipated and avoided. To prevent future recurrence of the problem, it is essential to carry out an investigation aimed at detecting the root cause of failure.

The ability to identify this weakest link and propose remedial measures is the key for a successful failure analysis investigation. This requires a multidisciplinary approach, which forms the basis of this book. The results of the investigation can also be used as the basis for insurance claims, for marketing purposes, and to develop new materials or improve the properties of existing ones.

The objective of this book is to help anyone involved with machinery reliability, be it in the design of new plants or the maintenance and operation of existing ones, to understand why the process machine fails, so some preventive measures can be taken to avoid another failure of the same kind.

An important feature of this book is that it not only demonstrates the methodology for conducting a successful failure analysis investigation, but also provides the necessary background.

The book is divided in two parts:

1 The first part discusses the benefit of failure analysis, including some definitions and examples. Here, we examine the failure analysis procedure, including some approaches suitable for different types of problems. We also look at how plant‐wide failure prevention efforts should be conducted, including a discussion about the importance of the role of the top management in the prevention of failure.

2 In the second part, different types of failure mechanisms that affect process equipment are discussed with several examples of bearings, seals, and other components’ failures.

Because it is simply impossible to deal with every conceivable type of failure, this book is structured to teach failure identification and analysis methods that can be applied to virtually all problem situations that might arise.

Trinath Sahoo