Failure Mode and Effect Analysis of Fire Tube Boilers Under Specific Operative Conditions

Document Type : Research articles

Authors

Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport

Abstract

In many industrial fields, boilers are considered vital and an expensive assets. In addition to initial cost, they require high
maintenance budget to be available in order to secure production in safe and acceptable working conditions .This kind of
assets must be well operated under experienced well-trained supervision and subjected to strict maintenance programs
executed by professional skilled personnel; otherwise dramatic consequences including loss of lives may result. The
literature includes much research that studied maintainability & reliability for water tube boilers, in which FMEA (failure
mode and effect analysis) and Ishikawa (fishbone) analysis are used. In addition, many of these researches are keen to
use metallurgical and chemical analysis to study failure modes. For a long period of time researchers have given great
interest in boiler tubes failures for different materials .This paper, presents a study of the maintenance and reliability of
fire tube boilers from real case studies using FMEA “failure mode and effect analysis”. Given the results of the study, the
authors propose areas of improvement with significant impact for the state of art. Finally, it was found that around 30%
of the failures could be prevented by means of proper maintenance procedures which are also highlighted and explained

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