Balance-of-Plant Condition Monitoring

In addition to the process-critical equipment assets found in industrial facilities, there are often a host of essential and auxiliary assets that make up the balance of the plant such as pumps, motors, blowers, heat exchangers, fans, and others. This balance-of-plant (BOP) equipment may be spared or unspared, and its impact on the process stream may vary from moderate to minor. Regardless, such machines – just like their “critical” counterparts – can benefit from condition monitoring. Bently Nevada offers affordable, effective portable and permanent condition monitoring systems for BOP assets. For tens of thousands of customers around the globe, our proven solutions are delivering tangible benefits – improved: maintenance planning, scheduling, “wrench time”; safety and environmental compliance; asset reliability/availability, and throughput/quality; and reduced: maintenance costs; energy consumption; spare parts inventory; catastrophic asset failures; and downtime.

The financial justification for monitoring BOP assets is different than that of critical assets. For critical assets, failure means substantial or total loss of production, often worth millions per day. For BOP assets, the impact of an individual failure is generally less dramatic, but nonetheless important when the following are considered:

Maintenance Costs – When viewed on a per-asset basis, maintenance costs for BOP assets can appear modest. However, when viewed collectively across the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of BOP assets in a typical plant, these costs can be appreciable. Reducing the maintenance costs on each asset through effective condition monitoring – even by a mere 10% – has a large impact on plant profitability.
Safety and Environmental Costs – Undetected failures of seals and bearings in pumps are just one example of scenarios that can lead to release of hazardous substances, fires, and even explosions. The impact of such incidents needs no elaboration and can be enormous – often resulting in total plant shutdowns and consequent loss of production.

Product Overview
Condition Monitoring Solutions for Balance-of-Plant Assets