BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb.26
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
The maintenance strategy of SOCAR’s Black Sea Terminal in Kulevi includes the continuous monitoring of the quality and efficiency of maintenance work in order to reveal deficiencies, Trend reports citing the terminal’s website.
The terminal is used for shipment of crude oil, fuel oil, diesel fuel, gas oil, methanol, aviation fuel, propylene, liquid pyrolysis resin, naphtha, isopropyl alcohol, diesel fuel with ultra-low sulfur content, industrial oil, and condensate.
The terminal in the Kulevi port was put into operation in May 2008, and the transshipment of oil products was launched in June. The total capacity of the terminal is 10 million tons of liquid bulk oil cargo per year, including three million tons of oil, three million tons of diesel fuel, and four million tons of fuel oil. The total capacity of the tank farm of the terminal is 402,000 cubic meters.
The strategy seeks to prevent and correct all deficiencies in order to extend the use-life of the equipment and to ensure the uninterrupted operation of Black Sea Terminal. There are numerous types of equipment and processes that are a challenge to control and maintain. Analyzing the analytical data helps us to identify the important and urgent performance gaps and set the appropriate measures for improvement.
There are different approaches on how the maintenance should be managed. Black Sea Terminal maintenance management considers the proactive approach vs. reactive, which aids in maintaining the continuity of operations. There is another critical aspect of the maintenance program – predictive maintenance, which includes condition monitoring. It is basically the application of condition-based monitoring technologies using various predictive tools: Vibration analysis; Infrared images (thermography); UT inspection; Oil analysis; Shaft alignment.
Even the best preventive maintenance program cannot stop all faults in equipment or systems but condition monitoring puts us in a position where we can eliminate any developing faults with our assets in a timely manner. The purpose of the predictive maintenance program is to monitor equipment health by collecting analytical data and controlling equipment performance for early detection of minor disturbances, which helps eliminate the problems that could lead to a breakdown resulting in unplanned downtime or unnecessary expenditures. The accuracy and quality of data is very important in this process.
As a result of effective implementation of the predictive maintenance program and by integrating maintenance analytics into the predictive maintenance process, Black Sea Terminal has significantly: Decreased the unscheduled downtime of assets; Increased manpower utilization; Reduced maintenance expenditures; Increased useful life of assets.
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