How systematic analysis helped leading lactic acid producer to quickly improve its plant reliability
Anhui BBCA & GALACTIC Lactic Acid Company Limited (B&G)
Anhui BBCA & GALACTIC Lactic Acid Company Limited (B&G, website: www.bglactic.com) was born in 2002 as a joint venture between the Anhui BBCA Biochemical Co. Ltd. (www.zlfysh.com), one of the leading agricultural products processing enterprise in China, and the Belgian company GALACTIC S.A. (www.lactic.com), the second largest producer of lactic acid in the world.
B&G is using highly efficient technology and is integrated to an existing corn-based glucose production site. This set up results in highly rationalized production costs thus warrants strong competitiveness to the company and ensures the highest quality standards for the products.
B&G products are marketed within the Chinese Domestic Market as well as abroad. Further expansions will enable the company to follow the market growth and to provide high quality lactic acid to Polylactic Acid (PLA) projects. PLA is a new promising biodegradable polymer derived from lactic acid.
B&G products are marketed within the Chinese Domestic Market as well as abroad. Further expansions will enable the company to follow the market growth and to provide high quality lactic acid to Polylactic Acid (PLA) projects. PLA is a new promising biodegradable polymer derived from lactic acid.
The maintenance project
After a few years of operation in a highly corrosive environment, the plant started to experience the early effects of aging: with production running at full capacity, breakdowns could affect the fulfillment of customers’ orders. Recommendation by another Siveco client in Anhui province (Saint-Gobain Pipelines in Maanshan) and the company’s successful track record in maintenance improvement were the key factors leading to the selection of Siveco for this project.
The main project goals were to build up a technical knowledge base for the plant, to support the maintenance team’s daily work and to provide a decision support system for the management team. The COSWIN system was up-and-running in about three months and during the next three months the quality of data was progressively raised to the level necessary to conduct in-depth failure analysis.
The improvement process: example of failure analysis conducted 6 months later
Pumps are critical pieces of equipment in B&G’s process: a failure could lead to a production stop resulting in significant financial losses. While technicians are familiar with pumps that break down several times per month and tend to focus their efforts on them, it is more difficult to identify less frequent breakdowns, the impact of which is however far from being insignificant in terms of time and money. As technical teams are busy dealing with daily emergencies, those infrequent problems tend to be overlooked: quick fixes are applied, without long-term solutions.
According to Martin van Gansberghe, former Deputy General Manager (Technical) at B&G and currently Technical Director of Galactic Group:
“Thanks to the Top 10 report in COSWIN, less than 6 months after implementation, we easily identified three types of pumps experiencing regular failures, which finally were more time-consuming than the most frequent, better known, problems.”
While the report did draw their attention to this particular problem, B&G’s technical team still had to understand why these breakdowns occurred. As Martin describes it:
“COSWIN simplifies our life: we sit around the table with COSWIN, then go to the plant: the conclusion is right before our eyes!”
The condensate pump was badly designed: the head was too low; as the pump was at times running light, the resulting cavitations accelerated the wearing out of the mechanical seal. The root causes of the other breakdowns were then quickly identified: an analysis of failures data gathered in COSWIN led the maintenance team to identify a bad mechanical seal choice for the evaporation pump. For the sulfuric acid pump, the main cause was bad operation of the pump: the timing of the related control valve was wrongly set up, causing the pump to run without load for a short moment.
Martin summarized the benefits of COSWIN-driven failure analysis:
“How could we have got rid of all these small, yet costly, failures without a systematic failure analysis process? In effect, the system literally pushes the results to the technical manager’s mailbox, so that he can follow the progress and questions his teams on a regular basis.”
“Before COSWIN, some of the problems were perhaps known (our technicians obviously knew the pumps had problems, we just did not take time to think about it). Some corrective maintenance work was so frequent that it was wrongly re-qualified as preventive maintenance: we had someone checking it everyday, ready to act when the problem occurred. Top management was not aware of problems until they got out of hand and affect the business. Root causes were not systematically identified, quick fixes were applied instead.”
