Across John Crane's Business Solutions team, we're excited about sustainability. Not only is this a critical element of John Crane's legacy, but resource efficiency is also closely tied to operational efficiency. By bridging maintenance strategy and sustainability, we can help our customers truly maximize the value of their assets — all while building a secure future for the energy and process industries.
To explore the intersections of sustainability and maintenance strategy, we recently sat down with an expert from our Business Solutions Division: Claire Weatheritt, CEng MIMechE MIET, Global Manager of the Project Management Office. Keep reading for her insights on maintenance strategy in the new energy era, including how Condition-based Maintenance (CBM) — one of her core focuses — helps our customers eliminate the inefficiencies associated with unnecessary maintenance and preventable failures.
John Crane: How does maintenance policy impact sustainability, and how does sustainability come into play in your role?
Claire: Firstly, our clients determine their policies regarding sustainability, reliability and safety. The policies they define in turn inform all the strategies that are subsequently implemented across their organization, including their maintenance strategy. Our clients' policies are driven by a combination of factors, including their own corporate values as well as governmental policy.
This has always been the case, and with the global drive to reduce emissions, along with the availability of emerging technologies, there is a significant drive to maintain performance standards and apply maintenance strategies that achieve regulatory and policy compliance.
I'm passionate about creating a more reliable, sustainable world that's safer for the people and the environment that we live in. I think we can achieve that by anticipating the things that can go wrong in the industry and strategizing to address these things before they cause substantial problems. That's what asset management is, really. John Crane can do that through maintenance strategy, CBM, which is a maintenance strategy, machinery diagnostics and the application of precision maintenance. Those are the elements that I'm interested in within asset management.
JC: Has the energy transition changed how your customers think about maintenance strategy? If so, how?
Claire: An example of this just came up recently. A customer's compressor failed, which caused it to generate increased emissions. That meant the process was going to generate too much CO2. The compliance rules have changed, and so have the penalties for generating CO2. There is an opportunity to review equipment failure criticality for our customers in light of the latest regulations. The consequences of a compressor not functioning have changed, and we can look at maintenance strategies with environmental regulations in mind.
Our typical process for developing a maintenance strategy involves reviewing all relevant regulations and what is needed to ensure compliance. We then need to clearly understand what we need our assets to do for us (required functions), how they can fail to achieve this, and why that matters. The energy transition doesn't change our process, but it may change the functional requirements for an asset and does provide an opportunity to ask customers when they last reviewed their maintenance strategies, given how rapidly the environmental space is changing.
JC: What are some roadblocks to maximizing equipment life? How does this connect to sustainability?
CW: If you design for the total cost of ownership, if you understand the process that you're putting equipment into, if you apply the right maintenance strategy and if you have the right spares strategy, you're setting yourself up to maximize the life of the machine. Taking all of these factors into consideration is really how you get the maximum life out of the machine. Firstly, we need a machine that is properly specified and designed for the application. We then need to ensure that it is installed and commissioned properly. Finally, we need to operate the machine as designed. Failure to ensure any of these can introduce defects that shorten equipment life. Also, doing unnecessary work on machines that are running well is not desirable, and neither is performing poor quality work. Every time you do unnecessary work, you risk introducing a fault such as a misalignment. As I mentioned earlier, unnecessary work also impacts an operation's sustainability.
The commissioning of a machine after installation or intrusive maintenance is a critical point, because what happens at this stage can determine its life expectancy. Random events can occur, such as a production upset that causes a catastrophic failure. There's nothing we can do about that from a maintenance perspective. But in terms of the machine's life, if we pick up inherent faults early, we can fix them and extend the life of the machine from the start.
Once a machine is running and we're satisfied that there are no inherent faults, we put it on its normal Condition Monitoring schedule. From this point, we can optimize its life by identifying any deterioration in machine condition or operating environment and taking action: Maybe it's dry bearings, and we grease them so we can maximize the remaining life of the machine. Condition Monitoring can also show us if the machine is sitting where it's happy (in its operating envelope), based on vibration signatures and pressure readings.
Buy-in is critical, and the lack of it can be a roadblock. When leadership in an organization really buys into and supports the maintenance strategies and shows that commitment, that's how we drive the process.
JC: How can John Crane support operators who are scaling up markets in hydrogen and/or CCUS?
CW: Both the controlled decommissioning and the creation of new maintenance strategies are required in any plant transformation. We are experienced in both.
These operators are going to have new assets that need to be managed, so they'll need to build an asset hierarchy and have it in a maintenance management system. We can provide those services the same way we do for oil and gas or any other industry.
It is our core activity of John Crane's Business Solutions to create maintenance strategies and performance standards that deliver against our customers' policies and comply with government (and other) regulations. As regulations change, all companies need to ensure they remain compliant. We are helping our customers with this. We then build the maintenance program to comply with the created strategy.
Our process considers the different regulations that our customers must comply with; that's the start of the process. We workshop with them, and then we identify the criticality of each piece of equipment. For the most critical pieces of equipment, we look at the required functions, failure modes, effects and criticality analysis. As we apply our process, we work with their teams — the people who know their assets — to derive the best maintenance strategies.
We have a library of proven strategies and will adjust them as needed, especially for specialized pieces of equipment like some involved in CCUS or hydrogen applications. For that equipment, we would typically run a workshop to develop maintenance strategies that avoid things like over-maintenance, which is often prescribed by the OEM. Once we work out with them what needs to be done, we use our reliability insights platform to support that, to ensure the decisions made are traceable.
Further to this, we have a tried and tested approach to demonstrably manage maintenance requirements in cessation of production. In any decommissioning, the removal of any maintenance plan needs to be controlled, to ensure the plant is compliant with the required performance standards throughout the process and has authorization to operate.
JC: Digital technologies will also play an increasingly central role in the new energy era. How does integrating IoT into maintenance strategy enhance sustainability efforts?
CW: IoT devices give us some interesting new opportunities. They allow us more regular data but typically we are trading off something to achieve this. It is important that the maintenance strategy and Condition Monitoring approach carefully considers all of the technologies available, ensuring that we get the results we need for a cost that works for the business.
Beyond vibration, which is often the first thing that comes to mind, many different parameters can be monitored. For example, changes in lubrication can be monitored much more frequently with IoT-enabled devices than if we send someone to the site.
Further to this, for smaller sites and normally unmanned installations, IoT devices can be deployed, enabling the optimization of maintenance on such sites without incurring the travel, with all its associated environmental implications.
Imagine if there's a one-month — or even two-month — frequency between when you send someone out to the site. The game really changes with IoT. It's not quite continuous monitoring, but you might be able to monitor every day or even every hour, which makes it more likely that you'll see events occurring.
For example, if we've got a journal bearing and a contaminant passes through it, this will cause a wear event that will then stabilize later. We wouldn't see this in vibration a month later. But multiple wear events will lead to the deterioration of that bearing. You wouldn't necessarily pick up on this from month to month, until the bearing is unable to stabilize the shaft. If you think about lube oil, these online devices don't tell us exactly what's happening in the oil. But they do tell us if something is changing in the oil, and that in and of itself can be useful information in some environments. We need to learn how to use this information effectively to drive the behavior that we want.
Condition Monitoring doesn't remove a defect, but the Condition Monitoring data can tell us that the defect exists and therefore empower us to do something about it. As long as the strategy is executed, it should result in less wear and less energy usage because the machines are running more smoothly. And that has clear sustainability implications.
JC: Is there anything else you'd like to share on Condition Monitoring and sustainability?
CW: Consider when your maintenance strategy was last reviewed. There may have been regulation changes since then, and there certainly will be some interesting new technologies. If we use the information we gather to develop your strategy, we can drive improved reliability and reduced waste. But you have to actually do the maintenance — and execute the CBM strategy — to realize those sustainability and reliability benefits.
From increased energy efficiency to fewer shutdowns, maintenance strategy is a powerful bridge between operational excellence and environmental impact. Contact John Crane's experts today to explore maintenance strategies such as CBM can power your sustainability in the new energy era.