Managing Centrifugal Pump Reliability in the Context of Total Cost of Ownership

The management of a population of centrifugal pumps in the petrochemical industry can be daunting. A popular method for strategically optimizing the maintenance and operation of these centrifugal pumps is to measure the reliability of the whole pump population in terms of Mean-Time-Between-Failures (MTBF). Too often MTBF improvement becomes the focus rather than a means of supporting the actual goal, namely Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reduction. An increase in MTBF is intuitively associated with a reduction of TCO, but this is not necessarily true. This study proposes that the ‘MTBF vs time’ and ‘TCO vs MTBF’ curves are characteristics of a specific industrial plant. A tool for approximating the optimum TCO vs MTBF for a plant is introduced, and a qualitative framework for managing pump reliability in the TCO context is proposed.