From Failure to Success: How RBD Modelling is Helping Oil and Gas Industries to Analyse and Improve Equipment Reliability and Availability.

The oil and gas industry relies heavily on a wide range of equipment and systems to carry out its highly technical operations to meet the design objectives. Ensuring the reliability and availability of these assets is crucial to the industry's success, as equipment failures can lead to costly downtime, safety hazards, and environmental incidents. In order to address this, asset maintenance solution providers often recommend RBD Modelling to analyse and improve equipment reliability and availability which further enhances operational efficiency leading to higher Return on Investment (ROI).

An RBD Model is a graphical or pictorial representation of the functional blocks in a system which demonstrates the logical interaction and interconnectivity between equipment in that system. When used within a dynamic simulation model this allows modelling of complex dependencies and optioneering to simulate scenarios using variations in failure modes, repair times, buffer capacity, stand-by equipment, or ?spare part supply to make availability predictions in order to select the best maintenance strategy and critical spares to maximise throughput and higher return on investment (ROI).

RBD (Reliability Block Diagram) Modelling then forms part of RAM (Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability) analysis which is a systematic approach to assess a system's productive capability throughout the asset lifecycle. This allows asset operators to identify contributors to un-availability, identify options and calculate the expected throughput, enabling them to make informed decisions and develop strategies for effective maintenance or spares optimisation. They are applicable to all phases of the asset lifecycle including pre-feed/ feed, operational phase, and late-life.

RAM Studies as part of ARaaS?:

At Optimal, RAM studies are a key component of our Asset-Reliability-as-a-Service suite of solutions that assists operators in the oil and gas industry to evaluate the ability of complex systems to achieve optimum throughput, determine the uptime percentage, identify the contributors to downtime and analyse the ease within which a system can stay operational.

We do these studies as static (spreadsheet) or dynamic simulations (Monte Carlo). We utilise software such as the AvSim module which allows you to construct RBDs through any number of indenture levels. These RBDs can represent standby and voting arrangements, phase-dependent configuration changes, switching logic and buffer facilities. Various Failure characteristic and maintenance models may then be defined and the impact on throughput assessed.

Consequences may be defined indicating the financial, safety, environmental and operational effects of loss of availability or throughput.

To know more about how RBD Modelling in RAM studies can help improve your asset reliability and availability, contact us via [email protected] I https://www.optimal.world/solutions/ram-studies-criticality-analysis/