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April 16, 2012

Plant aging and process safety

Human beings age, but plant's dont! If you agree with this statement, you are in trouble! As plants age, corrosion spreads, material fatigue occurs, and your maintenance practices need to understand and take into consideration the residual life of your equipment.
In today's cost conscious world, very few look at the long term picture and think that you can get away with repairs. Not so. If you neglect the residual life assessment of your plants, be sure that you will end up spending more money than what you would have spent if you had a long term strategy in place. What is happening today is that instrumentation and control systems keep getting regularly upgraded mainly because the vendors do not support them more than 5 to 7 years! But mechanical equipment continue to be used often at much higher rates than they were originally designed for. Many world class organizations have reliability and obsolescence cells specifically for drawing out a long term asset replacement plan. Do you have one?

 Contribute to the surviving victims of Bhopal by buying my book "Practical Process Safety Management"

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