Isograph’s integrated suite of RAMS tools applied at the design stage or to model existing plant, can provide the intelligence to improve the asset contribution to business outcomes. ARMS Reliability Engineers can undertake RAMS studies to meet your project needs.

ARMS have completed significant studies on whole plants in a short period of time. Our unique combination of expertise, knowledge and industrial experience provides you with a real choice of service provider. We can assess your needs, advise your options and estimate your costs for your next project.

Why Use RAMS on Major Projects?

• RAMS for new projects in defence, aerospace and upstream oil industry has been common for past several decades.
• RAMS for new projects in mining, resource and energy sector is less common.
• Some companies with multibillion dollar projects are now specifying RAMS analysis within their major project schedules

Can you answer these questions?

• Will the design meet the objectives over the lifetime?
• Is there enough redundancy?
• Are stockpiles, surge and buffers correctly sized?
• Identify bottlenecks.
• Will my maintenance strategy deliver what the design expects?
• How many resources will be required and when?
• How many spares will I need?
• How do I develop a maintenance plan for new equipment?
• How can I validate the OEM’s recommendations?

RAMS As Early as Possible in Project Cycle

IPA studies have shown that reliability analysis conducted early in project cycle saves 15% of total project costs.

The benefit of doing RAMS analysis early in a major capital project is that critical reliability issues can be addressed before expensive detailed design and procurement, and certainly making changes prior to construction and commissioning, saves a lot of valuable time and expense. Studies by IPA (Independent Project Analysis), show that better definition of requirements early in the project results in better cost perform­ance overall because improving the project defini­tion reduces the number of changes that oc­cur during its execution, when changes cost more.

In most major capital projects there are many alternatives to achieve required reliability and availability and in many cases such decisions can impact on the financial viability of the project, but these decisions also need to be balanced against the capital cost of construction and the operational expense impact on profitability.

Design engineers need to consider the reliability of equipment under the proposed service conditions, and also the maintainability and supportability considering logistics of supply, access to resources and the available operational windows to repair failed equipment with minimal disruption. In more recent times, major projects need to consider availability of skilled resources to undertake necessary maintenance actions. For these reasons a reliability prediction is used in a reliability block diagram to represent how equipment interconnects in a logical manner and shows the failure logic of a system.

Interdependencies between equipment, spares, resources, other equipment and events are clearly represented and allow the reliability engineer to simulate the likely behaviour of the system. Bottlenecks can be identified, equipment importance ranking provides focus to critical areas where design parameters such as redundancy, intermediate storage and equipment sizing can be reviewed and various alternatives evaluated to give the best predicted outcome.

Efficiency

The utilisation of RAMS tools for each phase of a capital project enables the final asset management plans to be created in a streamlined way consistent with the operational objectives of the project. In other projects where RAMS are not used the asset management plans are developed in silos with a lot of duplicated efforts and often biased towards the writer’s previous experience. This can result in disjointed maintenance plans which soon lose support and the effort is wasted. In the worst cases no documentation efforts are made and maintenance/operational people come out of plant commissioning still looking for Asset registers, Bills of Materials, and reacting to failures causing them to develop repair procedures on the run. A rule of thumb is that a planned predictive maintenance regime costs 70% less than a reactive regime. This is a lot of expense money wasted, and unfortunately in most cases the cost of failure and associated risk of damage, lost production and safety far outweighs the maintenance costs.

Variables in Major Capital Projects

RAM modeling includes modeling the effect of:

• Labour availability,
• Spares availability,
• Maintenance strategies
• Equipment failure behaviour including infant mortality, random failures and aging.
• Production capacity,
• Size of intermediate buffers such as stockpiles or surge tanks,
• Standby equipment,
• Shutdown intervals,
• System configuration changes.
• Phased changes over time.

The Monte Carlo simulator engine enables the analyst to model complex redundancies, common failures and component dependencies that cannot be modeled using standard analytical techniques including those listed below.

• Warm and cold standby arrangements
• Queuing for labour
• Queuing for spares from site, depot and factory
• Hold for repair
• Opportunistic maintenance
• Changing failure rates over time

RAMS Outputs

• An early indication of a system’s potential to meet the design availability and reliability requirements.
• Enables assessment of lifecycle costs to be carried out.
• An early indication of which components or areas contribute to the major portion of capacity loss.
• Enables trade offs to be made between reliability, maintainability, redundancy and buffer capacity.
• Provides early assessment of Safety and Environmental compliance.
• Identifies Critical items
• Predicts resource usage