Mechanical Damage Assessment for Pneumatic Control Valves Based on a Statistical Reliability Model.

A reliability assessment is an important tool used for processing plants, since the facility consists of many loops and instruments attached and operated based on other availability; thus, a statistical model is needed to visualize the reliability of its operation. The paper focuses on the reliability assessment and prediction based on the existing statistical models, such as normal, log-normal, exponential, and Weibull distribution. This paper evaluates and visualizes the statistical reliability models optimized using MLE and considers the failure mode caused during a simulated process control operation. We simulated the failure of the control valve caused by stiction running with various flow rates using a pilot plant, which depicted the Weibull distribution as the best model to estimate the simulated process failure.