(14b) Predictive Maintenance Basics for Process Safety Engineers: Understanding Predictive Maintenance Practices and the Implications to Process Safety

Maintenance practices, including preventive maintenance, inspection, testing, autonomous maintenance, and predictive maintenance, are components of equipment reliability programs and are parts of the OSHA process safety management (PSM) regulation. However, companies often work in silos where process safety departments and maintenance groups may not effectively share and leverage information that can improve equipment reliability which inherently improves process safety performance.

This paper will define terminology - including preventive maintenance (PM), predictive maintenance (PdM), and condition-based monitoring (CBM) - and will provide an overview of maintenance and reliability basics for process safety engineers less familiar with those practices. Examples will be provided of condition-based monitoring techniques for rotating equipment and non-destructive examination (NDE) techniques for static equipment.

While technology solutions continue to expand, scarce resources require that technology be applied selectively to equipment and safeguards where risk is the greatest. Risk may be commercial, reputation-related, environmental, and/or safety-related. Maintenance practices can be optimized by ensuring that safety critical equipment definitions correlate with process hazard analyses and other risk assessments. Incidents can be avoided be applying proactive maintenance, inspection, and testing practices to critical equipment and safeguards.

As a former reliability engineer who set up CBM and NDE programs, the author provides perspective regarding the interrelationship between these practices and process safety. As a former CBM specialist, maintenance planner, and mechanic, the co-author shares hands-on experience regarding implementing predictive maintenance practices.