Mike Meen, Technical Director at Bureau Veritas, highlights the crucial role that safety and environmentally critical elements (SCE) play in the chemical industry, and how evolving digitalisation is improving the monitoring of this equipment.
Safety and environmentally critical elements (SCE) are a risk-management tool within equipment and software across several industries, used to prevent or limit the effects of a major accident.
A common example of this is a relief valve on a pressure-containing device. The relief valve (the SCE) is installed on the equipment to prevent a rupture, safeguarding the plant or local area from potential hazardous leaks or explosions. As a vital piece of equipment, it’s critical that the element is well-maintained and regularly monitored to ensure its value and reliability.
Condition monitoring forms part of the risk mitigation process and has been undertaken in the chemical industry for decades. The concept and thinking behind condition-based maintenance dates back to World War II, where the RAF used the predecessor to ‘Nowland and Heaps’ reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) to look at particular components across its fleet of similar aircraft to assess the pass, fail and degradation of specific parts.
With that, the science of maintenance has improved over time, as has the reliability of components.
However, despite the ever-evolving development of products and technologies, condition monitoring has always been a process-heavy task, requiring hours of manpower to analyse individual pieces of data.
Digitalisation has allowed us to take the testing and maintenance, undertaken during the assurance stage, to trend the data and predict or lookahead at SCE longevity and functionality.
Assurance and the importance of data
Going back in time some years, the release of toxic materials to the environment wasn’t regulated; however, this has now thankfully changed for the better.
The reason SCEs now encompass the safety of both people, and the environment comes down to Environmental Protection Agency regulations which state that hazardous waste is stored separately, and spills and releases of potentially toxic materials must be prevented.
Assurance provides confirmation that a plant is doing all that is reasonably practicable – within the realms of technology and finances – to ensure that an SCE is working as it needs to for a particular installation. Assurance will largely comprise of regular testing and maintenance of the SCE.
Assurance must also consider any changes made to a piece of equipment with an SCE, which could alter its performance, and therefore the overall performance and safety of the plant. Changes could include to the design, maintenance or administration of the part, which impacts the probability of it working when it’s meant to.
The more maintenance and testing that is done on an SCE, we gradually build up a data record of equipment passes and failures. This is vital to ensuring safety of people and environmental protection.
Turning data into information
Going through the assurance process, companies will build up thousands and thousands of data sets, outlining the equipment, its testing and maintenance portfolio and any resulting faults that are identified. On more sophisticated pieces of equipment, we can move beyond pass and fails and start measuring performance analysis too.
Factoring in the multiple SCEs in situ in plants across the UK, including offshore plants, we are able to collect terrabytes of data, whereby we’re able to start recording things such as manufacturer’s details of the SCE, the type of equipment or SCE, faults and failures within the device; this is where data, turns into useable information.
Embracing digitalisation
With thousands of plants and industries testing and monitoring SCEs every month, we are faced with millions of data points from which to interrogate information.
Digitalisation has significantly improved the ways in which we can undertake condition monitoring. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled us to move away from simply interrogating those millions of data sets – i.e. counting how many times a certain piece of equipment has passed or failed, and instead move into trending the data – looking at performance analysis, product degradation and lifecycle predictions.
With the advent of sophisticated interfaces like AI, we can tap into multiple existing databases across numerous plants and industries, both for onshore and offshore installations, and crucially, predict failure before it’s too late.
Utilising the information that is already readily available, AI servers can connect the dots and reports can be instantly created to advise companies on the risks posed within their facility, based on the manufacturer’s products used, regularity of maintenance and dormancy of the SCEs. This could not only prevent an accident occurring, but crucially save lives; all from a computer.
