Perez, R. X.
Consultant, San Antonio, Texas
Robert Perez is a mechanical engineer with more than 35 yr of rotating equipment experience in the petrochemical industry. His experience includes extensive work in petroleum refineries, chemical facilities and gas processing plants. Mr. Perez has written numerous machinery reliability articles for magazines and conferences proceedings, and has authored or coauthored eight books related to machinery reliability. He earned a BS degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University at College Station and an MS degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and he is registered as a professional engineer in Texas.
Some basic, yet insightful, machinery reliability tracking tools are introduced here that can be developed with common spreadsheet applications, such as Excel.
Machinery professionals are constantly searching for ways to improve the reliability or capabilities of process machines. However, the level to which improvements can be economically justified is limited.
In Part 1 of this column (Hydrocarbon Processing, September), I began discussing useful techniques that fall into the general category referred to as “soft skills.”
When I ask people that work around machinery, “How do you improve reliability?” they often tell me to buy better bearings, seals, monitors or some other hardware-based improvement.