UTILIZATION OF FMEA TECHNIQUE IN REFINERY FACILITIES: AN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE OF PRIORITIZING HIGH-RISK MALFUNCTIONS IN REFINERY TOWERS

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a procedure in product development, system engineering and operation management for analysisof potential failure modes within a system forclassification by the severity and likelihood of the failures. FMEA technique is used to prioritize themost important failures in refineries. ‘Packing liquiddistributors’ is found to be the most important incident with the highest rate of Risk PriorityNumber (RPN). Revised FMEA which is carried outafter doing necessary preventive and corrective actions, shows a reduction of RPN rate, whichmakes this malfunction less important than the other malfunction, ‘Misleading measurements