Practical application of reliability engineering in detailed design and maintenance

Modern plant systems are closely coupled combinations of sophisticated and expensive equipment, some important parts of which may be in the development stage (high technology sector), and simpler, crude but not necessarily cheap equipment (low technology sector). Manpower resources involved with such plant systems can also be placed in high and low technology categories (i.e. specialist design and construction staff, and production staff, respectively). Neither can operate effectively without the other, and both are equally important. A sophisticated on-line computer controlling plant or analysing fault symptoms is useless, if not unsafe, if the peripheral sensing and control equipment on plant providing input data is poorly designed and inaccurate, and/or unreliable because of inadequate maintenance. Similarly, the designer can be misled and misinformed, and subsequent design evolution can be wrongly directed, if production recors do not accurately reflect what is actually happening on the plant. The application of Reliability Technology can be counter productive if it demands more effort in the collection of data that it save in facilitating quick, correct engineering decisions, and more accurate assessments of resource requirements. Reliability Engineering techniques must be simplified to made their use widely adopted in the important low technology sector, and established in all financial and contractural procedures associated with design specification and production management. This paper develops this theme with practical examples. (author)