Keeping Murphy’s Law In Check

Accessing deeper compressor knowledge to minimize disruptive impacts on the service lifecycle management

Author’s Corner: Harry Lankenau is a mechanical engineer with Neuman & Esser Group. He joined the company in 1985. In January 2002, he became the head of technical consulting with NEAC Compressor Service. His field of activities with NEAC Compressor Service includes technical support, vibration surveys, diagnostics and troubleshooting.

Editor’s Note: This paper was presented in September 2019 at the International Rotating Equipment Conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Introduction

These days end users of equipment – which piston compressors are part of – request a warranty or at least a reliable assessment of the “total cost of ownership” (TCO); the expected expenses of the machine over a period of many years or even over the complete lifetime; the latter being a real challenge since machinery might run for several decades.

The tool for the TCO assessment is the service lifecycle management (SLM). In the field of mechanical engineering, the SLM is concerned with services that accompany the production process with its plants, machines and tools. Specifically, service intervals and the necessary activities are to be managed and analyzed. Naturally, the TCO can only be determined and guaranteed by the machine manufacturer if they have sufficient information about the operation and the resulting cost factors.

There are, however, disruptive impacts on the above: Major machinery failures generating enormous repair expenses; and which might, in the worst case, lead to the outage of a large production section, if not the complete plant.

Equipment monitoring has been utilized to control chemical processes with alarm and shutdown signals to prevent critical scenarios. Figure 1 shows a typical signal storage device widely utilized in the past.

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This article was originally published in the July 2020 issue of COMPRESSORTECH². We only publish a fraction of our magazine content online, so for more great content, get every issue in your inbox/mailbox and access to our digital archives with a free subscription. Click here for a new subscription or here to renew your current subscription.