Reliability-Centered Maintenance Analysis on a Single-Stage Water-Cooled Oil-Injection Screw Compressor

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is applied to analyze a single-stage water-cooled oil-injected rotary screw compressor situated in one of Nigeria's offshore installations. Its eleven critical components were examined for a fifteen-month period from December 2020 to February 2022 with aggregated monthly running hours of 38723.993. Downtime period due to four significant component failures were in April, May, November and December 2021, during which the standby compressor of same model was put in service. This maintenance analysis is comprised of two sections: qualitative and quantitative (mixed method). First, the qualitative approach employed decisive tools like failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) and logic tree analysis (LTA) in accordance with Hinchcliffe and Smith's procedure to develop technically feasible maintenance tasks. Through these frameworks, answers to the seven RCM questions were demonstrated for conformance to SAE JA1011-specified standard RCM process. Second, the quantitative aspect studied critical components by incorporating reliability characteristics like failure rates, mean time between failures (MTBFs), reliability function, availability, maintainability with running hours from compressor in-service data. Evaluation of critical components with reliability characteristics enabled clear understanding, while considering whether or not failure(s) occurred. Altogether, the study analyzes the functionality of the compressor and suggests proactive maintenance tasks for improvement within its operating context via RCM.