Introduction to Reliability Centered Design
When building a new unit or facility, asset reliability is often not considered as part of the design. However, inefficient design can result in high life cycle cost over an asset’s operational life. That’s why it’s important to ensure you’re planning for reliability as early as the front end engineering and design (FEED) phase, as it’s the most cost-effective way of making a facility reliable to maximize production and return on investment.
Reliability Centered Design (RCD) is a popular analysis used to build asset management principles into the design of a greenfield facility or capital project. While RCD does provide efficiencies surrounding maintenance and life cycle cost, it does not provide detailed insight into the impact of design changes on system availability. It also leaves room for more finely tuned data to enhance the analysis results, which leads us to what we believe is the next evolution in reliability data modeling: Quantitative Reliability Optimization (QRO).
Let’s dive into how designing for reliability has evolved with RCD and how it will continue to evolve with QRO.