Maintenance strategy and availabity increasing of a gas compression station in the oil industry

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to propose a maintenance strategy and a set of improvement actions for increasing the availability in a compression station of waste gases from the petroleum distillation process, composed of two alternative compressors A and B in a plant of the oil industry. The research method was the quantitative modeling. The methodology includes the calculation of the current availability and suggesting actions to raise it. Time to repair (TTR) and time between failures (TBF) were modeled for the individual compressors and for the gas compression station as a whole. With the average values of the models (MTBF and MTTR) were calculated individual availabilities of A and B (32.4% and 83.3%, respectively) and global, 96.7%. The data were collected from the company's information system. By the form factors associated with TBF, it was possible to affirm that, despite operating for over twenty years, both machines are in the premature failures phase. This fact is due to the exchange of raw materials, which occurred about five years ago: the plant proceeded to process heavier oil, originated from the pre-salt layer, for which the installation was not designed. Such divergence may be characterized as a design fault, associated with the corrective maintenance strategy. Finally, a list of improvements projects was presented to increase the availability of the post and terminate the phase of premature failures.