Oman Gas Company Fault Tree Analysis

1- REASONS FOR EQUIPMENT FAILURES IN OIL & GAS INDUSTRY

Degradation and ageing of machinery and other tools is a key challenge to many gas and oil industries. Ageing installations affect the efficiency, which creates many uncertainties in the system. Inefficient systems affect worker’s safety and threaten their life. On the other hand, human errors are another major source of technical failures in industries. Working with people who do not understand all the safety requirements creates an unsafe environment for all the workers (Zhou et al. 2000).

Technical failures are contributed by various factors such as poor design, poor management and ineffective understanding of the working environment. Inadequate understanding of various safety measures

It helps in understanding the failure of systems in reliability engineering and safety engineering. It also helps in identifying the best methods that can reduce risks and determine the rate of safety and failure on a system level. In analysing the Oman Gas Company, it is clear that the company has failed in safety engineering and reliability engineering. Inadequate safety measures have resulted to use of faulty machines contributing to system downtime, costs on repairs, personnel costs, warranty claims and spare costs.

Oman Gas Company can utilize the fault tree analysis in monitoring and controlling system performance of its processes (Bahr 2000). For instance, a particular fuel pipe performance multiplied by valve malfunctions can be used to estimate the period that the pipe is going to run with the malfunctioned valve. The analysis can prompt the company come up with ideas that can help in minimizing and optimizing resources. Fault tree analysis can as well help Oman Gas Company to design a system and come up with the suitable requirements for lower level/output (Ozkaya et al.

(2007), the probability of failure of the top event can be analyzed by the functional hazard analysis. There is only single Top Event, and any failure or concerns must spread down from the tree. Each event that could cause failure is added as a series in the tree. To calculate the failure probability of the top event, the malfunctioning of the valve for a period of one year for normal operation, for instance, is 0.47. This implies that there is a 47.0 percent chance that dangerous events might occur. The basic causes of failure are ranked such as k1, k2, k3…using Vessley-Fussell importance measure (Ozkaya et al. 2007). For instance, for K1, the measure of importance can be Qk1= 0.186, K2= Qk2=0.018, this is represented as Top Event = k (0.186) x k