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Failure Analysis of Rotating Equipment Using Root Cause Analysis Methods
Failure Analysis of Rotating Equipment Using Root Cause Analysis Methods
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Process
People
Driving
too fast
Bald
tyres
Drunk
driver
CRASH!
Driver
depressed
Icy road
Materials
Environment
Management
did he see the car too late? Why was he in the middle of the road? The corner was
blind. He was driving too fast. He was drunk and his reflexes were slow.
Causal mapping is an attempt to formalize the interaction between deterministic
causes; Bayesian networks do the same statistically, introducing a probabilistic,
quantitative, element; the fault tree explicates the causal relationships using Boolean
logical operators. The Five Whys method is a simpler approach that focuses
attention down single causal chains: the cause of the cause of the cause etc. (times
five).
Bald
tyre
Icy road
No
seatbelt
Driver
died
CRASH!
Skidded
off road
Swerve
to avoid
car
Blind
corner
Drunk
Saw car
too late
Car
written
off
Depressed
Driving
too fast
Coll.
damage
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The general problem here is relevance. Whether a cause is relevant or not depends
on the context. The road safety expert, who wants to know why the corner is blind,
has different interests from the forensic psychologist, who is interested in the
depression and who, in turn, has different interests from the insurance lawyer who is
only really interested in the drinking. When investigating equipment failure, the
relevant causes are the ones that give you a solution.
Discovering Causes
But there is a much bigger problem with these methods than relevance. These
methods make quite extreme demands on the omnipotence of failure investigators,
as they all assume that the causes of a failure are known in detail and with certainty.
In reality, we often have little clue what the causes of a failure are or could be and
very often, once we start looking, we come up with a large number of contradictory
candidates, not all of which can be the case. Before we can analyse the causes of a
failure, we need to find out what they are.
The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his 1843 book A System of Logic,
gave five methods for discovering causes. Of these, the method of difference has
proved the most fruitful for practical applications. Faced with a failure, say a
damaged steam turbine, rather than asking Why did this turbine fail? you ask Why
did this particular turbine fail and not this nearly identical turbine next to it? or Why
did this turbine fail today and not yesterday?.
The idea is to look at the difference between the failure case and a case as similar to
it as possible but in which the failure did not occur. The cause of the failure must be
found in the difference between the two cases. By restricting attention to the
differences between the two cases, you essentially ignore everything they have in
common and you dramatically reduce the amount of material and the number of
possible causes you need to consider.
By switching through a variety of similar cases, we can generate a large number of
hypothetical causes and causal scenarios. Not all these will be true, but there are
well defined criteria for evaluating causal theories and choosing between them. And
its far better to have to choose between too many than to miss the right one or not to
have any at all.
Mills difference method as a practical tool for failure analysis
The difference method forms the basis of a powerful tool for discovering relevant
causes in cases of machinery and equipment failure in the power sector. By
comparing the case in which the failure has occurred with similar cases in which it
hasnt, we dramatically reduce the field over which we must search for possible
causes. Moreover, if a cause can be found in the difference between two real cases
then there is a much better chance that it is possible to correct the problem, bringing
the problem case closer to the case where the problem hasnt occurred. Our
contrasts need not necessarily be real cases; often contrasting with hypothetic cases
can be very revealing.
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Now let's look at a case study from the power sector to illustrate how failure analysis
theory can be applied in real life
Case study shaft failure of diesel engine generator set
In this case, critical failure of the main shaft of a diesel engine driving a generator at
a power plant had occurred. The engine is a modern 18 cylinder 4-stroke gas engine
connected to a generator via a coupling. An extensive material analysis of the failed
shaft suggested that the crack initiated in a weak spot and progressed through
fatigue a very common finding in material analysis related to a failure. The way the
crack had propagated is consistent with torsional vibration.
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