Because plants are made up of engineered components, moving parts, and instrumentation, they break down. There’s no way to stop this. It is after all entropy. But there are ways to make sure that the breakdowns are opportunities, and not catastrophes.
A plant breaks down into components which continually operate with no problems, components which occasionally have maintenance problems, components that have sudden failures after working for years, and components that fail regularly and require regular repair and maintenance. The first two can be handled by scheduled maintenance, perhaps during a shutdown or a turnaround. The third type of component failure can be difficult to predict. The fourth type are what are often called, “bad actors,” because they are known points of regular failure. Control Valves are some of the most frequent bad actors on any plant site. If you cannot stay on top of these bad actors, they will cause problems up to and including plant destruction. If you cannot prevent failures from occurring, they will stop production, costing profit dollars to fix. In some cases, the failure of a control valve could initiate a cascading failure that might keep the plant closed for months.
The key to all of these problems is to know what the Remaining Useful Lifetime of a component is. The remaining useful lifetime of a control valve can be determined rather closely by the use of the UReason Control Valve App. UReason has both extensive field experience and unparalleled expertise in expert systems, artificial intelligence and condition monitoring.
UReason’s Control Valve App is a simple, stand-alone app that will take the data you already have and use it in an AI-based analysis engine to tell you which control valves will fail soon and when they fail. This allows you to provide inexpensive “valve life insurance” by making it possible to perform prescriptive maintenance on the control valves in your plant.
UReason has extensive expertise in valves, actuators, and the relevant processes. They’ve compiled a huge library of valves, compressors, motors, drives, fans, turbines and other devices, their failure modes and how specific failures will affect the remaining useful lifetime. Using the library’s data, and the data from the valves themselves, the Control Valve App uses intelligent models that combine domain knowledge and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide advanced condition monitoring and recommendations for control valves.
In the basic app, a PDF report is the output, while the premium version can have an online dashboard and provide job orders, based on the valve monitoring results, in the maintenance management system of the plant. You can use UReason’s intelligence in a single application, like the Control Valve App, or in an enterprise version, UReason’s platform APM Studio can be used to manage all of your processes and all your varied types of assets.
The Control Valve App will allow you to switch from reactive maintenance to data-driven prescriptive maintenance. It will reduce unplanned repairs, and even better, it will help you postpone significant replacements, based on the actual remaining useful lifetime of the valve or actuator.
And if the control valves in your plant do not fail catastrophically, you have saved the lives of many of the people who work at your plant.
Download Control Valve App brochure
If you want to see how the CVA works, and how you can best use it, you can download a brochure here.
