Preventing downtime can feel like a constant battle, but it doesn’t have to be. Gaining a better understanding of your systems and how they operate and interact is the first step towards implementing a proactive asset management strategy, and making unplanned outages a thing of the past.
Twenty percent of unexpected electrical failures are caused not by faults in individual devices but by environmental factors. As plants, processes, and systems grow more complex and interlinked, the maintenance strategies required to ensure reliability and prevent downtime necessitate an ever more sophisticated approach.
Modern maintenance requires not just a mastery of individual components, but a deep understanding of a system’s constituent parts, and how they all fit together and interact. Having the most up-to-date electrical equipment counts for little if you’re using it in a way that is fundamentally inefficient, or not in alignment with the wider operations around it.
The most advanced component in the plant can still fail early if the system around it is misunderstood.
For instance, you could have a brand new circuit breaker with the latest and most advanced functions and features. However, if that breaker is then installed within a system that exerts undue stress on its physical parts, then the breaker will wear prematurely and eventually fail – sometimes without warning.
In an unplanned downtime scenario, replacing the device and getting operations back online as quickly as possible is the number one priority. However, unless a route cause analysis (RCA) is undertaken to understand the conditions that caused it to fail in the first place, the cycle of failure, downtime, and replacement is doomed to repeat.
This is a challenge. Plants often have to contend with aging assets and legacy equipment alongside new, highly sophisticated technologies, making already complex systems even more difficult to maintain effectively. Having to constantly firefight new problems as they emerge can often get in the way of any attempts to shift the dial meaningfully towards more proactive maintenance approaches.
Reactive maintenance often feels urgent because the same hidden causes keep creating new emergencies.
However, doing so is not as daunting as it may seem, and the benefits can be profound. The vast majority of failures of electrical equipment are preventable if you know where to look. With the right tools, the right mindset, and some key fundamentals in place, the uphill struggle to prevent downtime can be overcome by any plant. This, in turn, can facilitate the shift from reactive to proactive maintenance and uncover hidden opportunities to optimize and modernize across the whole operation.
Single Line Diagram
For example, Single Line Diagrams (SLD) are in many parts of the world a regulatory requirement. As a visual representation of a facility’s power distribution, the SLD is a vital tool for ensuring electrical safety and enabling timely and accurate troubleshooting. They are arguably the single most important document relating to a facility’s electrical systems. As such, they should be accurate and regularly updated whenever changes are made to any of the plant’s electrical distribution systems. However, in reality, many facilities around the world often use incomplete SLDs or allow them to lapse.
An up-to-date SLD is fundamental to understanding the system’s interconnectivity and power flow. Without it, the safety, reliability, and efficiency of the entire system can be compromised. If a new component is added to the system without first referring to the SLD, it can potentially cause serious issues for electrical systems across the plant. Furthermore, if an accurate and up-to-date SLD cannot be located, any problems that do arise will also be very difficult to diagnose and resolve.
Many electrical contractors will refuse to carry out work on a site without a current SLD, or will charge more to create their own before proceeding with any of the changes or upgrades they’ve been contracted to carry out.
Attempting to upgrade or expand the plant’s capacity without consulting the SLD to verify that the electrical systems can handle any different or additional loads can result in safety and reliability issues later on. As such, making sure the SLD is accurate and up-to-date should be one of the first and most important steps carried out in any power system study or site assessment.
Know What’s Really Going On in Your Plant
Maintenance processes can only be optimized if you know what they are. Some aspects may be obvious, such as how many personnel are in the maintenance team and what their duties are. However, some elements may be less clear, such as exactly what is currently in the spares inventory, or what the replacement or lifecycle strategies are for each piece of equipment in the plant.
The reliability of installed equipment is affected by a wide range of different factors: the asset’s age, condition, lifecycle stage, load, running hours, the environment in which it operates, and that’s just for one individual device.
When you start to consider how each element of a system impacts the other elements around it, these equations can become incredibly complex. If the load varies throughout the system, then this will affect voltage, power flow, and equipment performance of other systems and devices, both upstream and downstream.
Reliability problems rarely stay isolated. One overlooked change can quietly affect equipment across the entire system.
Issues can also be hiding in plain sight. Underspecified equipment may not be capable of coping with the actual demands placed on it by the system. For instance, consider a 50 kA circuit breaker. It may run without incident for many years and effectively manage the system’s short-circuit capability.
However, if changes are made to the wider system that affect the short circuit level, then this circuit breaker will no longer be fit for purpose. When making plant upgrades, it can be easy to overlook the potential consequences and knock-on effects for every device and system.
Furthermore, without the right expertise and experience on-site, it is difficult to gain the deep understanding needed of exactly where the pinch points are throughout the plant and how to address them. However, advisory solutions such as ABB Navigate can provide a wide range of assessments and studies that allow plant operators to very quickly gain a deep understanding of what’s really going on in their plant. These insights can then be used to optimize maintenance strategies and transform the resilience of their operations.
Make the Most of Your Data
What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get improved. The latest circuit breakers and switchgear can generate near-constant streams of data tracking a wide range of operational parameters. However, this data is of little value to anyone unless it is actually leveraged to drive meaningful improvements.
Electrical distribution equipment often shows no outward signs of wear – until it’s too late. Consequently, data-driven condition monitoring capabilities can be underutilized or ignored, which means that opportunities to optimize systems and operations are potentially being missed.
Data should be at the heart of any modern plant. Trend analysis can identify opportunities to improve efficiency and productivity, while fault analysis can significantly speed up troubleshooting and facilitate a shift towards condition-based maintenance. Often, devices are already generating this data, but unless it is properly harnessed and understood, the insights it can uncover will be out of reach.
Asking the Right Questions
No two plants are the same. However, every facility around the world wants to achieve optimal performance and maximize growth and profitability in a safe and sustainable way. Reducing the carbon footprint of operations and accelerating towards net zero is also an increasingly urgent priority.
Irrespective of how large an organization is, what industry they operate in, or where in the world they’re located, each and every one needs to ensure that their electrical systems are safe, secure, reliable, and sustainable.
Improved uptime starts with knowing what problem you are actually trying to solve.
The journey to improved uptime is not just about implementing processes and leveraging data. Achieving the right outcomes is also about asking the right questions to begin with. What are your priorities? What is it that you actually want to achieve? Whether it’s improving safety and security, reducing downtime, or improving efficiency and productivity, there are many ways of reaching the same goal, and no one-size-fits-all approach.
In a maintenance context, this is about shifting mindset and thinking more deeply about how your systems are operating. Every plant has pinch points, but not every plant will appreciate its wider significance and take the necessary steps to address its underlying causes.
For instance, a plant may have a recurring issue of nuisance tripping on a breaker. Resetting or even replacing the breaker will solve the problem temporarily, but the underlying issues that are causing it to trip will still remain. Understanding the wider context as to why it is tripping and what conditions contributed to it can allow plants to identify and address the true causes, resulting in better system health and reliability, not just for the breaker itself, but for wider systems and devices also.
Navigating Towards Better Reliability
It’s widely acknowledged that plants and facilities need to shift from reactive to proactive maintenance to improve the reliability of equipment and reduce downtime risks. However, turning this into reality is for many plants easier said than done. ABB Navigate is a suite of solutions and services, delivered by ABB’s Electrification Service team, that can help plant operators to understand what is really going on in their plant. It encompasses a wide range of different disciplines relating to the maintenance and management of electrical equipment and systems.
Through Power System Studies (PSS), assessments, operational benchmarking, and advisory services, ABB Navigate guides plant owners and operators on a journey towards more reliable and resilient operations.
Rather than merely troubleshooting problems as they happen, it joins the dots between an organization’s everyday pinch points and wider strategic goals. Through understanding a plant’s operations at a granular level, it provides actions and recommendations to drive improved reliability, safety, security, and energy and carbon performance, while also shifting the dial towards long-term growth, profitability, and sustainability.
Take the 5-minute Reliability Self-Check that gives you a clear reliability score and practical insights to help you shift from reactive fixes to long-term resilience.
