Supporting group maintenance through prognostics-enhanced dynamic dependability prediction

Condition-based maintenance strategies adapt maintenance planning through the integration of online condition monitoring of assets. The accuracy and cost-effectiveness of these strategies can be improved by integrating prognostics predictions and grouping maintenance actions respectively. In complex industrial systems, however, effective condition-based maintenance is intricate. Such systems are comprised of repairable assets which can fail in different ways, with various effects, and typically governed by dynamics which include time-dependent and conditional events. In this context, system reliability prediction is complex and effective maintenance planning is virtually impossible prior to system deployment and hard even in the case of condition-based maintenance. Addressing these issues, this paper presents an online system maintenance method that takes into account the system dynamics. The method employs an online predictive diagnosis algorithm to distinguish between critical and non-critical assets. A prognostics-updated method for predicting the system health is then employed to yield well-informed, more accurate, condition-based suggestions for the maintenance of critical assets and for the group-based reactive repair of non-critical assets. The cost-effectiveness of the approach is discussed in a case study from the power industry

An RFID application for the process mapping automation

n/

A decentralized application for the traceability process in the pharma industry

n/

Dynamic failure rate model of an electric motor comparing the Military Standard and Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF) methods

Abstract Electric motors are industrial systems' components widely diffused enabling all productive processes and safety equipment. They are affected by aging effect with a contribution based on the environmental condition on which they work. In order to design efficient maintenance plans, the behaviour of their main components, such as bearings and winding, has to be predicted. Therefore, a model-based methodology is applied aiming at codifying the failure rate of an electric engine, taking into account the thermal aging and relevant environment boundary conditions in which bearings and winding operate. The winding failure mode is coded by means of the Military standard technique while the bearings one is simulated comparing the Military Standard and the Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF) techniques. While the former predicts more conservative behaviours, the latter, taking into account lubrication conditions, dynamic loads and a better knowledge of materials quality, enables to capture the evolution of the operative conditions. The proposed reliability model can capture both the deterministic and stochastic behaviour of the electric motor: it belongs to the field of hybrid automaton application; the model is coded by means of the emerging software framework called SHYFTOO. The proposed model and the Monte Carlo simulation process that performs its evolution can support the development of a new class of electric motors: a cyber-physical oriented electric motor

Economic order quantity and storage assignment policies

The basic Harris’s lot size model dates back to 1913 (Harris, 1913), hence one century from its publication has been recently celebrated. Starting from the seminal work of Harris, a wide plethora of contributors has faced with the lot-sizing problem for fitting the basic model of the economic order quantity to several environments. In fact, the three key parameters constituting the basic model, i.e. the demand rate, the ordering costs, and the inventory holding costs, have been widely explored in order to relax the assumptions of the original model. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the liaison between holding costs and warehouse management has not been completely addressed. The holding costs have been early considered for simplicity as primarily given by the cost of capital, and thus dependent solely on the average inventory on stock. Conversely, by including a more detailed supply chain costs contribution, the economic order quantity calculus appears depending on a recursive calculus process and on the storage assignment policy. In fact, different approaches of warehouse management, e.g. shared and dedicated storage, lead to highly variable distances to be covered for performing the missions. This leads to a total cost function, and consequently to optimum lot sizes, that are affected by the warehouse management. In this paper, this relationship has been made explicit in order to evaluate an optimal order quantity taking into account storage assignment policies

Improved dynamic dependability assessment through integration with prognostics

The use of average data for dependability assessments results in a outdated system-level dependability estimation which can lead to incorrect design decisions. With increasing availability of online data, there is room to improve traditional dependability assessment techniques. Namely, prognostics is an emerging field which provides asset-specific failure information which can be reused to improve the system level failure estimation. This paper presents a framework for prognostics-updated dynamic dependability assessment. The dynamic behaviour comes from runtime updated information, asset inter-dependencies, and time-dependent system behaviour. A case study from the power generation industry is analysed and results confirm the validity of the approach for improved near real-time unavailability estimations

A Novel Approach Based on Stochastic Hybrid Fault Tree to Compare Alternative Flare Gas Recovery Systems

Flaring has always been an inseparable part of oil production and exploration. Previously, waste gas collected from different parts of facilities was released for safety or operational reasons and combusted on top of a flare stack since there was not the possibility to treat or use this type of gas. Concerns about global warming led to several initiatives for reducing flaring or even eliminating combustion. Treating flare gas was made possible by the introduction of flare gas recovery systems that have become increasingly obligatory. Most solutions add a flare gas recovery system to an existing flare system. In a typical scenario, after analyzing the existing facility and collecting the necessary data, alternative designs are proposed and criteria are determined to make a choice between the proposed alternatives. In this paper two designs of a gas control system are proposed, and reliability was chosen as the deciding factor. Using repairable dynamic fault trees, the failure models of the two designs have been implemented. Afterwards, a novel hybrid technique, the Stochastic Hybrid Fault Tree Automaton, is used to model the working conditions in which the system operates, with the aim to achieve a more realistic assessment and evaluate the disaster likelihood associated to these failures. It is shown that the latter enables a richer analysis where the effects of failure can be better assessed. This is important for correct choice between design alternatives because, as shown in the case study, the results of the two analyses can lead to contrasting conclusions of the solution to adopt. Further investigations have been carried out focusing on the safety sub-systems and on the basic events in each design. The Importance Measure analysis revealed that some of the components were responsible for most of the critical failures, thus locating some areas of possible design improvement

Performance assessment of domestic photovoltaic power plant with a storage system

Grid-connected low voltage photovoltaic power plants cover the majority of the power capacity installed in Italy. They offer an important contribution to the power demand of the utilities connected but, due to the nature of the solar resource, the night time consumption can be satisfied only withdrawing the energy by the national grid, at the price of the energy distributor. Thanks to the improvement of storage technologies and the decreasing of costs, the installation of a system of battery looks a promising solution. In this paper, a model-based approach to analyze and discuss the performance of a domestic photovoltaic power plant with a storage system is presented

On the use of dynamic reliability for an accurate modelling of renewable power plants

Renewable energies are a key element of the modern sustainable development. They play a key role in contributing to the reduction of the impact of fossil sources and to the energy supply in remote areas where the electrical grid cannot be reached. Due to the intermittent nature of the primary renewable resource, the feasibility assessment, the performance evaluation and the lifecycle management of a renewable power plant are very complex activities. In order to achieve a more accurate system modelling, improve the productivity prediction and better plan the lifecycle management activities, the modelling of a renewable plant may consider not only the physical process of energy transformation, but also the stochastic variability of the primary resource and the degradation mechanisms that affect the aging of the plant components resulting, eventually, in the failure of the system. This paper presents a modelling approach which integrates both the deterministic and the stochastic nature of renewable power plants using a novel methodology inspired from reliability engineering: the Stochastic Hybrid Fault Tree Automaton. The main steps for the design of a renewable power plant are discussed and implemented to estimate the energy production of a real photovoltaic power plant by means of a Monte Carlo simulation process. The proposed approach, modelling the failure behavior of the system, helps also with the evaluation of other key performance indicators like the power plant and the service availability