3 minute read
Food & beverage
Maintenance solutions drive huge savings
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Flow found out how a focus on pump reliability and non-intrusive pump maintenance has enabled asset care engineering services provider, Musk Process Services, to save its clients hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
Musk Process Services maintains and upgrades a wide range of manufacturing equipment for its industry clients, but the company has recently found that improvements to pumps and their maintenance plans are providing especially large savings for its customers, both in time and money.
“Pumps are a key element in most manufacturing environments and are often put under a lot of strain which can lead to accelerated degradation and premature failures,” said Stef Smith, Head of Asset Care at Musk. “Because of the huge production impact that taking pumps offline can have – whether because they have broken down or have been disconnected for maintenance and repair – it is paramount to not only minimise the frequency of pump breakdowns, but also to ensure that any maintenance work can be carried out with minimal disruption to production.”
One of the ways Musk has been able to minimise pump downtime and increase reliability is by using condition based monitoring techniques in place of intrusive maintenance.
A recent example of this was the implementation of a new maintenance strategy for liquid-sugar recirculation pumps at a large food manufacturing plant. The reactive maintenance strategy was resulting in poor reliability for an asset that required 24/7 functionality, as well as an excessive spend on spare parts for repairs.
After conducting a reliability centred maintenance and root cause analysis study on the progressive cavity pumps, a new programme of monthly vibration analysis was implemented. The non-intrusive vibration analysis is carried out whilst the pump is running, and allows Musk to capture potential failures in the early stages of defect. This means individual components can be replaced instead of a full pump change which was previously necessary, when component failures would cause collateral damage to other pump components.
The results of this new predictive maintenance strategy include both a significantly improved mean time between failure and a saving in the region of £30,000 per annum for the client in component spend on one pump alone.
In addition to condition monitoring, Musk has also found that more unusual upgrades to pumps can produce large savings. At a paint manufacturing client, following a computerised maintenance management system review, the Musk engineering team noted that a set of pumps the client had previously installed were over engineered for their application. The pumped fluid’s high solids content and quick drying properties were causing accelerated wear to the pumps, creating inflated running costs from excessive breakdowns and the need to engage specialist labour from abroad to maintain the pumps.
After interrogating the process conditions and chemicals involved, Musk was able to propose a downgrade to the pumps’ seals to a standard over-the-counter gland packing seal which was more suitable for the process conditions. Whilst a downgrade may be an unusual solution, it is a profitable one for the manufacturer. For a total of seven pumps, this has reduced the annual maintenance costs from £25,000 to £205 for a £10k initial investment. The solution is currently being rolled out across a further 25 assets at the client plant, each of which will achieve similar savings.
However, these savings are a drop in the ocean compared to another upgrade made at the same client plant. A non-foolproof computerised operating system that controlled the paint wash pumps, valves and pipework was costing the manufacturer 175 hours and over half a million pounds in loss of paint volume per year. A project to diagnose the paint wash faults culminated in a simple upgrade to the Computerised Maintenance Management System’s HMI screens – a solution which now allows the client engineers to find and diagnose pump and valve problems with a 70% reduction in faults. This has been recognised by the paint manufacturer as an expected £380,000 per annum saving across the six lines it has been installed on.
“Pumps may not be the most glamorous of production assets, and they can be some of the most expensive to maintain,” said Musk Operations Director Darren Martin, “but that also means that they are where some of the most effective reliability improvements and considerable cost savings can be made.”
