Preventative, Predictive and Prescriptive Maintenance of Heat Exchanger Networks: What’s the Difference in Economic and Environmental Terms?

The process industry is going through a digital transformation and heat exchangers are a key part of it. Traditional preventive maintenance philosophies that seek to clean heat exchangers at regular intervals are more and more replaced with predictive tools that enable the optimisation of cleaning actions. Through predictive maintenance, operators are warned in advance of potential issues (e.g. operating limits being hit) and action can be taken to minimise unexpected shutdowns, loss in production, fuel consumption and environmental impact.

A prescriptive maintenance approach, which still quite new to the industry, goes even further allowing the operator not just to be warned when it is optimal to clean but also which is the optimal method to use and for how long. However, both predictive and prescriptive maintenance approaches hinge on the ability of the software tools to accurately predict fouling in the heat exchangers, its impact on plant operations as well the description of the effects that cleaning actions have on the performance of the units once they are brought back into operations.

In this presentation, we will use a Hybrid Digital Twin and a case study from a real plant to assess the difference between a preventive, predictive and prescriptive maintenance approach to cleaning heat exchangers in terms of overall plant economic and environmental emissions.