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Breaking the Cycle of Pump Repairs

Of the numerous process centrifugal pumps undergoing repair right this very minute, an estimated 90% have failed randomly before. Some have run just fine until the very first repair two or three years after startup, and were never quite the same since after the first repair. Other pumps failed frequently or randomly— perhaps once a year--from the time they were originally commissioned. That brings up such questions as: Could it be we don’t really know why many process pumps are failing? Could it be we just don’t give pumps the attention they deserve? Is it because everybody’s priorities are elsewhere? Or are there perhaps elusive failure reasons, i.e., factors overlooked by all parties? Fortunately, improvement is both possible and cost-justified. Allowing repeat failures on process pumps rarely makes economic sense. Simple benefit-to-cost or life cycle analyses will easily demonstrate that the pursuit of remedial action greatly benefits users. Examining the cost of failures One way of exploring the value of extending pump mean-timebetween-failures (MTBF) is to examine the likely savings if we could improve the MTBF from presently 4.5 years to a projected 5.5 years. Say, a facility has 1,000 pumps; that’s 1,000/4.5 = 222 repairs before and 1000/5.5 = 182 repairs after understanding and solving the problem. Avoiding 40 repairs at $ 6,000 each is actually a very low estimate, but would be worth $240,000. Avoiding repairs frees up manpower for other tasks: At 20 manhours times 40 incidents times $100 per hour, reassigning these professionals to other repair avoidance tasks would be worth at least $80,000. There is also one ~$3,000,000 ($3M) fire per 1,000 pump failures. An engineer at a U.S. Gulf plant thought it might more likely be 1 fire per 1,000 pump failures, then out of 10 fires he figures seven are less than $50K, two are $50-500K and 1 is >$500k. He asked the author to provide the source of the $3M/ 1,000 failures figure. Suffice it to say the numbers are based on 52 years of experience and two recent updates. Data obtained in 2012 from a refinery in the Chicago area considered the $3,000,000 low, whereas a facility in one of the mid-western states of the U.S., in 2009, thought it was spot-on. So, the numbers are reasonably accurate. Take into account that cost and details of catastrophic incidents are often closely guarded secrets. Virtually all consulting done today by qualified independent professional engineers is linked to a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. The client is often compelled to file reports with local and federal regulatory agencies. These reports might differ from the findings of consulting engineers who understand the true root causes of failures, or whose sense of priorities is tuned to higher standards. Diverging statements or findings might feed a bureaucratic machine that will busy itself with issues of this type. However, these estimates for the value of fire damage restoration cost are in line with experience: Avoiding 40 repairs would be worth 40/1,000 x $ 3,000,000 = $120,000. Together, the three items ($240k, $80k and $120k) add up to $440,000. Although $ 6,000 was used for repair cost avoidance calculations earlier, an average API pump repair at a Texas refinery costs slightly over $10,200; a refinery in Mississippi reported $11,000. If the incremental cost of upgrading during the next repair adds $2,000 to the repair bill and avoids even a single failure every 3 or 4 years over the 30-year total life of a pump, the payback will have been quite substantial. It would be reasonable to assume 8 avoided repairs at $6,000 give payback of 48k/2k = 24:1. The quoted repair cost numbers of close to $11,000 reflect what needs to be considered in a pump repair cost calculation: Direct labor, direct materials, employee benefits at roughly 50% of direct labor, refinery administration and services costs at close to 10% of direct labor, mechanical-technical service personnel overhead costs amounting to ~115% of direct labor, and materials procurement costs from 7% to 8% of materials outlay (Bloch and Budris, 2010; Ref. 1). Disregarding the true cost of failures or repairs is likely to deprive some users of seeing the true benefit-to-cost ratio associated with pump upgrades. We could examine other ways to calculate as well. It would be reasonable to assume that implementing a component upgrade (generally the elimination of a weak link) extends pump uptime by 10%. Implementing 5 upgrade items yields 1.1^5 = 1.61--a 61% mean-time-between-repair (MTBR) increase. Or, say, we gave up 10% each by not implementing 6 reasonable improvement items. In that instance, 0.9^6= 0.53, meaning that the MTBR is only 53% of what it might otherwise be. That might explain industry’s widely diverging MTBRs. The MTBR-gap is quite conservatively assumed to range from 3.6 years to 9.0 years in U.S. oil refineries and, as of