Handbook of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety in Engineering Design By Rudolph Frederick Stapelberg

Handbook of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety in Engineering Design By Rudolph Frederick Stapelberg

Preface

In the past two decades, industry—particularly the process industry—has witnessed the development of several large ‘super-projects’, most in excess of a billion dollars. These large super-projects include the exploitation of mineral resources such as alumina, copper, iron, nickel, uranium and zinc, through the construction of huge complex industrial process plants. Although these super-projects create many thousands of jobs resulting in a significant decrease in unemployment, especially during construction, as well as projected increases in the wealth and growth of the economy, they bear a highrisk in achieving their forecast profitability through maintaining budgeted costs. Most of the super-projects have either exceeded their budgeted establishment costs or have experienced operational costs far in excess of what was originally estimated in their feasibility prospectus scope. This has been the case not only with projects in the process industry but also with the development of infrastructure and high-technology projects in the petroleum and defence industries. Themore significant contributors to the cost ‘blow-outs’ experienced by these projects can be attributed to the complexity of their engineering design, both in technology and in the complex integration of systems. These systems on their own are usually adequately designed and constructed, often on the basis of previous similar, though smaller designs.It is the critical combination and complex integration of many such systems that give rise to design complexity and consequent frequent failure, where high risks of the integrity of engineering design are encountered. Research into this problemhas indicated that large, expensive engineering projects may have quite superficialdesign reviews. As an essential control activity of engineering design, design review practices can take many forms. At the lowest level, they consist merely ofan examination of engineering drawings and specifications before construction be gins. At the highest level, they consist of comprehensive evaluations to ensure due

diligence.

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