Consulting
Reliability & Maintenance

MISTRAS’s reliability & maintenance engineering services help plants reduce downtime and maximize productivity through assessing existing process and aligning them with industry-best practices.

Refineries, manufacturing and petrochemical facilities, and other process plants must contend with high maintenance costs to repair unreliable equipment, along with the opportunity costs unexpected equipment failure leads to unplanned downtime.

MISTRAS offers reliability & maintenance engineering services and programs to help ensure not only that our clients’ equipment is reliably in-service, but also operating as efficiently as it can be. We work to help you make informed maintenance decisions.

Benefits of Improved Equipment Reliability & Maintenance

MISTRAS’ Reliability & Maintenance engineering programs enable most cost-effective maintenance, as equipment stays in operation longer and with fewer mechanical issues. This allows for longer runtimes, more efficient turnarounds, and greater productivity.

Our programs can develop client-specific plans that result in:

• One quartile improvement in mechanical availability
• Savings of up to 25-30% of maintenance costs
• An increase of up to two years between turnarounds
• Increases of 1-2% in plant availability

Maintenance Management & Effectiveness

MISTRAS Group helps your staff identify the vital decisions that most significantly impact reliability and plant maintenance costs, and we help you implement strategic changes that address the issues.

Our Maintenance Management programs are strategic initiatives to optimize maintenance spending. We can help you and your staff to assess overall maintenance effectiveness, incorporate industry-best-practices, and define and achieve specific improvement objectives for reliability and maintenance in both organizational design and procedures.

Maintenance Management engineering services focus on a handful of important areas:

• Maintenance Philosophy
• Goals and Objectives
• Work Planning and Scheduling
• Staffing and Contract Control
• Maintenance Work Procedures
• Technical Support and Training
• Organization Design
• Safety
• Proactive Maintenance
• Budget and Cost Control
• Process Operations

Turnaround Management to Improve Reliability and Optimize Maintenance Spending

Turnarounds are one of the most significant areas that lead to high maintenance costs, but plant management often times can reduce these costs through more effective turnaround planning.

A targeted slice of MISTRAS’ Maintenance Management programs, our turnaround planning services help you optimize your turnarounds through three steps: assessing current effectiveness, benchmarking the competition, and developing an implementation plan.

Assessing Current Effectiveness

We help you define key performance measures for your upcoming turnaround, and identify any existing or potential barriers. We also conduct extensive reviews to pinpoint any major areas of opportunity that had been previously identified, and estimate the anticipated incentives for each area of improvement.

Benchmarking the Competition

In this step, we identify procedures for screening, budgeting, and schedule turnaround work, and use this information to predict the estimated run length of the turnaround. We also compare existing processes against industry competition and best practices.

Developing a Turnaround Implementation Plan

In the final planning step, we define action steps and assign responsibilities, along with identifying the training needs for turnaround execution personnel. We’ll establish turnaround milestones, and compile an implementation schedule that ensures turnaround work will be completed safely and effectively.

Hydroprocessing Unit Surveys

Hydroprocessing Unit Surveys are implemented to identify operational changes and low-cost, high-impact projects to achieve quality hydroprocessing unit performance. Hydroprocessing encompasses chemical engineering processes in a wide variety of units.

We have the capabilities and experience to deal with hydrocracking units and all other fixed-bed hydrotreating units, especially those treating:

• Alkylation plant feeds and reformer feeds
• Jet, kerosene, diesel, gas oil, atmospheric and vacuum residua
• Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit (FCCU) feeds

Our Approach to Hydroprocessing Surveys

A concise team of process and engineering technology specialists partner with the designated client personnel and conduct an on-site survey of the subject unit. The survey builds upon existing information obtained from equipment drawings, maintenance history records, operational and reliability issues, catalyst performance data, and hydrogen balances. The objectives of each survey are tailored to the requirements of management.

The focal points of the survey include:

• Potential product yield and quality improvements, and low-cost capacity expansion opportunities
• Operating cost reduction – opportunities in such areas as hydrogen consumption, catalyst selection and catalyst replacement frequency, and energy conservation
• Reliability improvement opportunities for optimizing FCCU and FCCU feed pretreatment operations, reformer and reformer feed pretreatment operations, and other opportunities

Hydroprocessing Survey Deliverables

Upon completion of a survey, our team meets with refinery management and presents the results, including recommendations that lead to improved unit process performance and mechanical reliability. Final survey documentation is submitted shortly thereafter, and typically includes specific action plans to implement items such as:

• Improvement in product yields and qualities, including improvement targets and measures of success
• Low-cost capacity expansion opportunities
• Operating cost-reduction opportunities that have the highest payouts, including priority action plans
• Short-term and long-term steps for improving operations, as well as reliability and maintenance, including identification of specific equipment upgrades that would be beneficial
• Strategy for capturing inter-process synergies