Mike Meen, Technical Director at Bureau Veritas, highlights the crucial role that safety and environmentally critical elements (SCE) play in energy, chemical and process industries, 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 and energy industries 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.
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 resource to analyse individual pieces of data.
Turning data into information
Digitalisation has significantly improved the ways in which we can undertake condition monitoring. Machine learning and artificial intelligence 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.
Factoring in the multiple SCEs in situ in plants across the UK, including offshore plants, we are able to collect terabytes 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.
With the advent of sophisticated interfaces, 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.
For operators of industrial facilities, this offers peace of mind that continuous reporting can be done to predict any potential outages, ensuring a consistent ‘state of play’ for the plant.