The company currently provides condition monitoring services to five Hunter Valley longwall mines, encompassing a range of techniques such as vibration analysis, oil analysis, thermography, ultrasonic and temperature monitoring. Shell Services recently strengthened its technical representation in that area with the appointment of Gary Horner and Wayne Frew, previously with Pacific Power.
One of the areas the company is growing is ‘reliability engineering,’ which aims to use condition monitoring and other data to improve the reliability of machinery. This enables the root cause of repeating failures in equipment such as gearboxes to be addressed and re-engineered.
“Our view is that condition monitoring needs to be put within a reliability improvement vision,” said Shell Services reliability engineer, Peter Todd.
The philosophy is to identify symptoms in equipment failure, using quantitative condition monitoring data. Todd said the root cause was usually apparent in the failure mode and in the condition monitoring history.
In terms of quality assurance, the company is already complying with the new ISO standards due to be introduced later this year. This is made easier by the fact that Shell Services is represented by manager Leith Hitchcock on a number of ISO committees that are developing new standards governing the collection, analysis and reporting of condition monitoring.
Other services offered by the company include an oil filtration service aimed at checking the cleanliness of oils and ‘laundering’ used oils for re-use. This represented a potential major saving for some companies, Todd said.