Bloch, Heinz P.
Heinz P. Bloch resides in Montgomery, Texas. He retired as Exxon Chemical’s Regional Machinery Specialist for the U.S. and has authored or co-written more than 780 publications, among them 23 comprehensive books on practical machinery management, failure analysis, failure avoidance, compressors, steam turbines, pumps, oil mist lubrication and optimized lubrication for industry. Mr. Bloch holds BS and MS degrees (cum laude) in mechanical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering (NCE). He is one of 10 inaugural inductees into NCE’s Hall of Fame, which honors its most distinguished alumni.
HP Reliability: Pump alignment saves power
Awareness of energy efficiency is one of the minimum job qualifications for reliability engineers. In the summer of 1994, Jack Lambley, then an intern at the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Rocksav..
HP Reliability: Consider procedure cards, technical books and maintenance conferences for training
Because our memories are imperfect and we don’t want to risk making mistakes, we learned to jot down brief reminder notes on paper. Some people call it a cheat sheet, or a checklist. An airline p..
HP Reliability: Selecting steam turbines in a ‘lean’ environment
We received a nice compliment recently from a reader in South America. He wrote: “I am a mechanical engineer working on power plant designs at a major corporation and admire your work as a writer..
Consider lobe blowers combined with compressors
New blower meets low-pressure applications cost-effectively
HP Reliability: Dealing with asset management and life extension
The business manager for an asset management solutions (AMS) firm in the Middle East faced a big task. He had been asked to execute a major project for an oil and gas producer and wanted to have his q..
HP Reliability: Spare parts availability and the need for non-OEM options
Reliability engineers and their associated job functions often try hard to make their responsible supply-chain staff or purchasing departments understand that it is impossible for the maintenance depa..
HP Reliability: One pump fire per 1,000 pump repairs
While performing reliability audits decades ago, pump-failure statistics were made available or could be recovered with relative ease. But even then, the sources were usually kept confidential because..
HP Reliability: Suction specific speed choices have consequences
A refinery engineer was in a quandary over requests from a project group. High volume/pressure/temperature pumps in hydrocarbon service were involved and the refinery’s standards had, in 2007, be..
HP Reliability: Consider a new twist on data collection
The following abbreviated sequence of correspondence is real, although we quite obviously had to hide some names. Still, it is quite typical of many discourses our editors carry on with readers or con..
Avoid failures with pump power-end upgrades
Designing-out maintenance and failure risk starts with simple upgrading measures, culminates in re-thinking entire bearing housing configuration
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