Best Recommended Option
Abstract
Chris and Fred discuss which liner is best to use on a centrifugal pump, or make a general recommendation. How do you make a recommendation using reliability performance?
Key Points
Join Chris and Fred as they respond to a listener who asked how to identify the best liner for a centrifugal pump. The context is that this pump is used on a mining site and pumps a harsh slurry containing grit that can be acidic (which attacks metals). So this is not a typical centrifugal pump, as this liner is used to protect metal from the slurry in a sacrificial way. The listener has access to an ‘experience base’ with a recommended liner for each application. However, the listener wanted to go further and asked where the data for this base is… and now wants to make better future liner decisions.
Topics include:
- Modeling data with the right distribution. If damage accumulation is cumulative (adds up, doesn’t multiply up), then you would expect the bell curve to model time to failure. If the data doesn’t align with the bell curve, then some other mechanism is at work that we need to understand.
- How is it decided now? … and what’s the basis for this? Don’t throw away an expert decision. But also don’t trust decisions that have always been made that way. Speak to the engineers and understand how the liner fails. Go back to first principles first.
- Understand how it will actually be used. Do you know the pressure? Flow rate? Particle size? Acidity? Can any of these be linked back to the data? Can machine learning help?
Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design-for-reliability techniques to field-data analysis approaches.
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