Cost effective maintenance strategy for centrifugal pumps using reliability centred maintenance

The aim of this work is to obtain a maintenance strategy that is cost effective for centrifugal pumps using reliability centred maintenance (RCM). The components of the centrifugal pump used for the study are the shaft, impeller, bearing, mechanical seal, coupling, shaft sleeve, wear-ring casing, suction flange and discharge flange. The motor that drives the pump was also considered. Two basic tools of the RCM strategy were applied. These are the failure modes, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) and logic tree analysis (LTA). Failure data for a period of 10 years about a centrifugal pump was collected and the FMECA was applied to determine the failure modes, the effects of the failure, the criticality of the components, the mean time between failure (MTBF), the failure rate and the mean time to repair (MTTR). The risk priority numbers of all the components were estimated. The LTA was applied to come up with a new maintenance strategy for each of the components of the pump. The maintenance cost consisting of spare part cost and labour cost for the pump components were estimated for the current maintenance practice as well as the new or proposed maintenance practice. The most critical components observed were the motor, shaft, impeller and the mechanical seal. The motor has the highest MTTR value (58 hrs) while the mechanical seal has the highest failure rate (8.06E-04 per hr). The proposed maintenance strategy leads to reduction in spare part cost in a number of components, with the largest reduction of 19.88% occurring in mechanical seal. The proposed strategy also leads to reduction in labour cost in motor, shaft, impeller and the mechanical seal with the values 33%, 25%, 50% and 25% respectively. The methodology could be applied to other devices.