Since 1987 – Safety Consultancy

RAMS – Availability Analysis

Eidos develops availability analysis for engineering firm worldwide wherever the project is about:

  • Single items or group of equipments
  • A new plant or a revamped one
  • A new isle or a revamped one
  • A new site or a revamped one

Eidos can develop Availability analysis at the following stages of the design:

  • FEED
  • Detailed
  • End of the design
  • As built

The availability studies prepared during the first two stages are “engineering oriented” where the goal will be to identify and evaluate quantitatively the impact of any modification to the global availability of the designed system. In this way, working jointly with the design team, Eidos will supply a list of improvements evaluated singularly. This will ease the following stages of evaluation about the investment return for each modification.

The availability studies prepared on the “as built” or at the end of engineering services stage is usually required to certificate the effectiveness of the design or to meet the contract requirements between the engineering firm and its customer.

Whatever the scope is, the availability analysis can be carried on with or without evaluation of ancillaries systems (steam, EE, cooling water, fuel gas, etc.) and control/signal system (taking into consideration: spurious trips, false readings, interferences, etc.).

Eidos uses the QFBAA (Quantitative Functional Block Availability Analysis) method that provide a full quantitative evaluation of the availability.

QFBAA allows an easy weighting of any improvement to the system under review.

The sources of information about reliability of the single item (and the related failure modes) used during the development of the analysis are well-known international standards like OREDA, Sintef, IEEE “Gold-book”, etc. On engineering firm request these datasets may be integrated with manufacturers information or its own knowledge. Of course, if a functional safety study (SIL) of the project is available or under review, the assigned Safety Integrity Levels will be used as references for the availability analysis.