"What is your mean time between repairs (MTBR)?"
This was the primary question I and several other reliability and rotating equipment engineers discussed during a one-week mechanical seal and pump reliability class I took back in 2014. At that time, I was the only reliability engineer at a small to medium-sized refinery in central Alabama. Our plant housed approximately 700 pieces of rotating equipment, not including 46 reciprocating compressors. Our 12-month rolling MTBR averaged close to 60 months, but there were a few bad actors that always seemed to keep us under the industry standard. The other engineers in the class, who came from various Gulf Coast refineries, seemed to have the same story as myself. Some claimed their MTBRs were around 72-76 months, and others were somewhat lower, landing in the 48-52 month range. Either way, our conversation had a consistent theme: We all wanted to know how to achieve the industry standard of 60 months, how to maintain it and, most of all, how to surpass it and be the best. Let's face it: Most engineers are just a tad arrogant, competitive and tenacious, and there are reliability or rotating equipment engineers who are even worse.
If you are not familiar with MTBR, it refers to the mean time between repairs of various types of rotating equipment. Most commonly, the petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries utilize the MTBR calculation and trends to track or measure their ability to successfully operate and repair rotating pieces of equipment. Obviously, a higher average MTBR or an increasing MTBR trend represents more reliable rotating pieces of equipment and operations. This article isn't going to focus on how to calculate MTBR, build the trends, or the specific types of equipment that are included or not included in the calculation. Instead, it will focus on how a talented roto group at a large Bay Area, California, refinery almost doubled the API-610 MTBR industry standard over the past five years, soaring to an average MTBR of 100 months.
For the past 10 years, I've spent my career as a reliability engineer focusing on maintaining rotating pieces of equipment in the pulp and paper industry and refinery industries -- and now as general manager of Alfred Conhagen Inc. of California, where we specialize in rotating equipment repairs for numerous industrial facilities. A local Bay Area refinery is nearby. Since August 2016, I have had the pleasure of working directly with its roto group on hundreds of rotating equipment repairs. This group is consistent, tenacious and has the drive to maintain continuous communication with all of our shop personnel. They also have a pump shop supervisor who has the natural ability to spot the smallest issue or detail from a "social distance" of 6 feet!
Managing rotating equipment repairs is an art, and it takes years of experience and a genuine team effort to produce quality repairs on a timely basis. Obviously, the quality of these repairs directly affects a facility's MTBR. The key to quality repairs isn't just understanding every detail of your piece of equipment and all the fancy API-610 standards and specifications; it is also directly related to the communication and relationship between the individuals repairing your pumps and the engineers or supervisors managing and inspecting the repairs. This is how the refinery's roto group and our Conhagen shop excel as a unit. Our facility and the roto group clearly understand that installation, operation, system performance, condition monitoring, preventive maintenance programs, vibration testing, correct startup/shutdown and equipment selection all play their own roles in maintaining a standard MTBR. But this group has well exceeded the industry's standard MTBR, and I believe their success is not embedded in standards and specifications, but is centered around their ability to communicate their expectations for those standards and specifications on a daily basis - not only to Conhagen's team but to their management and operators as well.
For more information, visit www.conhagen.com or call (707) 746-4848.
