Provision of Reliability Data for New Technology: Approach for estimation of failure rate function for a sub-sea pump

Abstract

As part of the project thesis the candidate shall work on the following. 1. Document a literature survey of relevant reliability data sources and evaluate these with respect to applicability and quality. The data sources shall, as a minimum,include OREDA, MechRel and FIDES. 2. Give a brief technical description of a subsea pump and its topside counterpart and highlight similarities and differences, technical, as well as operational and environmental. 3. Carry out an FMECA with focus on the failure causes and mechanisms for the two pumps. 4. Analyze the information found in OREDA for pump, especially related to the contribution from maintainable items and failure descriptors. 5. Identify the reliability influencing factors for both topside and subsea application and illustrate them by Bayesian networks. 6. Discuss the constant failure rate assumption made in OREDA and discuss whether or not the same assumption may be made for a subsea application. 7. Based on a literature survey, identify approaches to extrapolate data from one application to another to estimate plant specific failure rates. The survey shall, as a minimum cover the approaches outlined by Brissaud, et al(2010), proportional hazards analysis, accelerated failure-time analysis and the UPM approach. 8. Develop a new step-wise approach to provision of failure rate functions for new technology equipment in subsea applications and describe each step of the approach. Discuss the pros and cons of the suggested approach.