What is the Shutdown Turnaround Plant Maintenance?
Oil refineries and Petrochemical plants often halt routine production & operations to conduct preventive maintenance, revamps and upgrades. The whole plant is stopped for an extended period of time, usually measured in numbers of shifts and even number of days or months, to do equipment preventive maintenance and care; corrective repair; strip-down and overhaul; or component replacement work. And that’s what is called Shutdown Turnaround Plant Maintenance.
What are the types of Turnaround | Shutdown? & explain?
There are two types of Shutdown
Planned Shutdown
These situations are prepared and organized over many weeks and months prior to the work being done. For shutdowns of large industrial operations or for complex, difficult situations, the planning, scheduling, and organizing of work and resources can even take years to do.
Unplanned Shutdown
There can be occasions where you have a forced plant outage or a forced maintenance outage. These are stoppages which are unplanned events causing the operation of equipment to stop. They may be equipment breakdowns, They can also be disruption of services, like utility power supply loss or unavailability of raw materials.
What are the Types of Shutdown Projects?
Plant Maintenance Shutdown project planning and scheduling is an important function that has a direct and dramatic impact on maintenance costs and bottom-line profitability of a process plant.
Maintenance costs are the result of the expenditure of manpower, equipment, and materials. Keep manpower and equipment usage efficient, and you will control your Shutdown Turnaround Plant Maintenance costs.
All the major process industries like refining, petrochemicals, power generation, etc., have their own terminology for maintenance projects. “Shutdown” is intended to encompass all types of industrial projects for existing process plants including:
- Inspection & Testing
- Emergency outages
- Debottlenecking projects
- Revamps
- Catalyst regeneration
List out the Shutdown Turnaround Plant Maintenance Work?
The Shutdown Turnaround Plant Maintenance work list should be prepared in sections, to make it easier to organize work, as well as to facilitate review and modifications to the list.
The sections should follow the order of the list of ancillary equipment, such as towers, vessels, drums, fired heaters, heat exchangers, rotating equipment, piping, instruments and electrical, etc.
Sections for piping, instruments, electrical and miscellaneous work can describe all the works which are not specifically associated with any of the major process equipment.
The worklist should describe in sufficient detail the amount of work, both routine preparation as well as inspection and repairs. This will enable the planner to develop a good work scope.
Routine preparation work consists of required activities which are well-known or can be easily established before the turnaround starts. These activities include:
- Erecting and dismantling scaffolding
- Insulation removal and re-installation
- Installing/removing blinds
- Opening/closing manways
- Equipment cleaning/decontamination
- Initial equipment inspections & testing
Non-routine activities include all repair/replacement work, including post-repair inspections, x-rays, hydro tests, stress relieving, etc.
What are the Stages of Shutdown Projects?
The Shutdown Projects has 3 stages
- Pre Shutdown Work
- Shutdown Execution
- Post Shutdown Work
- Pre shutdown work:
This stage occurs right before full-scale execution. Pre shutdown work focuses on training and orientation needs, mobilization and final execution plans. Operations, maintenance, and contractors must be completely aligned.
This is an opportunity for all parties to understand the scope of work to be done, the sequence and details of the shutdown process, and also leads them to prepare for the entry.
During this stage, the core team’s activities should focus on:
- Objective & Teambuilding.
- Maintenance & contractor orientation and training the execution Manpower.
- Safety plan implementation.
- Detailed execution plan.
- Cost tracking and reporting.
- Handover the plant to the contactor
- Install temporary offices, stores, and tool houses.
- Mobilize the execution Manpower.
- Beginning the prefabrication work.
- Beginning the on-site pre-shutdown work.
- Finalized the shutdown worklist.
Shutdown Execution
During this stage, the core team’s focus moves from planning to execution. The individual responsible for execution should assume the leadership of the team. This stage begins as feed is reduced and includes shutdown, preparation for entry, work execution, and start-up, all of which should be covered in the detailed plan of Critical Path and Critical Mass Jobs.
During execution, the core team’s activities should focus on:
- Pre-start-up safety review.
- Unit shut down and preparation for entry.
- Daily shutdown meetings.
- Schedule reviews and updates.
- Repair works under Progress as per shutdown worklist
- Daily cost tracking and reporting.
- Additional work review and processing.
- Tracking additional work and scope changes.
- Documenting all repairs.
- Documenting all inspections.
Post shutdown
This stage covers demobilization, documentation, cost reports, and most importantly, lessons learned that could be carried forward to the next shutdown. Executing this stage in a timely manner with a quality result will depend on data collection effectiveness during the execution stage.
It is vital that the core team has the time to complete this aspect of their responsibilities. Successful completion of this stage can have a major impact on the next Shutdown.
During the post-shutdown work stage, the core team’s activities should focus on:
- Post-shutdown unit and lay-down area clean up.
- Resolution and disposal of excess material.
- Updating the shutdown historical database.
- Demobilization of contractors & Handover of the plant to Client.
- Release to operations.
- Start-up on schedule.
- Issuing the report of performance, final cost report & shutdown reports
- Lessons learned and recommendations for the future shutdown.
So how do you Measure the Performance and Success of Shutdown Turnaround Plant Maintenance?
Common goals are zero harm, on budget, on time, hand-overs to schedule, the proportion of planned work versus unplanned, equipment commissioned to the procedure, the speed that the plant returns to full rate in-spec production. To achieve these goals, you need efficient & experienced manpower. Even after spending a huge amount of money and time it would go in vain without proper manpower, here we Transcend source people with most efficient methodologies.