Maintenance engineering input to the FDP

In conjunction with the production operations input into the FDP describing how the process will be operated, maintenance engineering will outline how the equipment will be maintained. Maintenance is required to ensure that equipment is capable of safely performing the tasks for which it was designed. This is often stated as maintaining the technical integrity of the equipment. 

The mechanical performance of equipment is likely to deteriorate with use due to wear, corrosion, erosion, vibration, contamination and fracture, which may lead to failure. Since this would threaten a typical production objective of meeting quality and quantity specifications, maintenance engineering provide a service which helps to safely achieve the production objective. 

The service provided by maintenance engineering was traditionally that of repairing equipment items when they failed. This is no longer the case, and a maintenance department is now pro-active rather than reactive in its approach. Maintenance of equipment items will be an important consideration in the FDP, because the mode and cost of maintaining equipment plays an important part in the facilities design and in the mode of operation. 

Increasingly, maintenance engineers think in terms of the performance and maintenance of equipment over the whole life of the field. This is often at the centre of the decision on capex-opex trade-offs for example spending higher capex on a more reliable piece of equipment in anticipation of less maintenance costs later in the life of the equipment. 

Statistical analysis of failures of equipment show a characteristic trend with time, often described as the bath tub curve  

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