About

Since 1990’s the increased level of automation coupled with a highly competitive environment in all industries has led to heavy losses in case of equipment failure. Typically chemical plants like plastic molding units, fertilizer plants, petrochemical refineries etc suffer huge losses under such conditions. The trend initiated by the industries is to move towards total preventive maintenance, which means evolving a system, which never fails. This has lead to a shift from breakdown maintenance to preventive maintenance. Failure free operation of a plant requires planned preventive maintenance, condition monitoring, failure analysis and detection of chronic problems, proactive corrective actions, and proper operating procedures and planned replacement of equipment. The present paper aims at development of an expert system for total preventive maintenance. A detailed study of a large fertilizer plant has been undertaken to identify the current existing maintenance practices, analysis of possible failures in future, evaluation of equipment against standards and condition monitoring methodology followed. Recommendations for maintenance schedules, equipment repair and replacement, improvement of equipment efficiency, calibration schedule etc is made. The work aims at creating a knowledge base to be used by maintenance personnel in the absence of an expert in the field. The knowledge base is created by accumulation of the knowledge of several widely represented experts. Thus with this accumulated knowledge base the maintenance decisions become independent of the operating personnel and depend only on the plant condition. Further the expert system also incorporates a knowledge base for diagnostics. An untrained operating personnel, detecting an abnormal operating condition (for example a leak, smoke, a blown of fuse, excessive heating of machinery etc) can seek the help of the expert system for diagnosing the fault and get recommendations for rectifying the fault. In this paper, the expert system package “EXTPM” in developing using VP expert, which has a dominant backward chaining control mechanism. The package has an effective layout, incorporates plenty of graphics and supports methods for visualization. The package developed is extremely user friendly and wide applications in small and medium sized plants are envisaged.

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