A reliability analysis of a natural-gas pressure-regulating installation

A case study involving analyses of the operability, reliability and availability was made for a selected, typical, high-pressure, natural-gas, pressure-regulating installation (PRI). The study was commissioned by the national operator of the natural-gas, transmission-pipeline network for the purpose of validating the existing operability and maintenance practices and policies. The study involved a failure-risk analysis (HAZOP) of the selected typical installation, retrieval and analysis of the available corrective maintenance data for the PRI's equipment at the network level in order to obtain the failure rates followed by an elaboration of the quantitative fault trees. Thus, both operator-specific and generic literature data on equipment failure rates were used. The results obtained show that two failure scenarios need to be considered: the first is related to the PRI's failure to provide gas to the consumer(s) due to a low-pressure state and the second is related to a failure of the gas pre-heating at the high-pressure reduction stage, leading to a low temperature (a non-critical, but unfavorable, PRI state). Related to the first scenario, the most important cause of failure was found to be a transient pressure disturbance back from the consumer side. The network's average PRI failure frequency was assessed to be about once per 32 years, and the average unavailability to be about 4 minutes per year (the confidence intervals were also assessed). Based on the results obtained, some improvements to the monitoring of the PRI are proposed. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.