Improving Maintenance Strategy by Physical Asset Management Considering the Use of MFOP instead of MTBF in Petrochemical

The aim of this study is to compare the aviation derived reliability metric known as the Maintenance Free Operating Period (MFOP) with the traditionally used reliability metric called Mean Time between Failure (MTBF), which has its innate disadvantages in the field of maintenance. This is mainly due to MTBF’s inherent acceptance of failure and the unscheduled maintenance directly associated with it. Moreover, MFOP is successfully applied to a Petrochemicals-specific case study. To date, no other application of the MFOP concept to the Petrochemicals sector is known. In this study, first, an extensive review of the literature is presented. This section covers concepts relevant to the study and helps to contextualize the problem, revealing the major shortcomings of the commonly accepted MTBF metric. Then, for the analysis of MFOP performance of the systems, a methodology that makes use of failure statistics to analyze both repairable and non-repairable systems is presented. Validation makes use of a case study, which applies the MFOP methodology to a system, specifically in the Petrochemicals sector. It was shown that MFOP could be applied to the data obtained from the Petrochemicals sector, producing estimates, which were accurate representations of reality. These findings provide an exciting basis for facilitating a paradigm shift in the mindset of maintenance personnel, setting reliability targets, and dealing with unscheduled maintenance stops.