I-care Keeps Petrochemicals Moving Globally

Keeping Petrochemicals Moving Globally

To increase the reliability and availability of Anthony Veder’s fleet of 28 gas tankers specialized in the transport of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and Petrochemical gases, the company needed to be able to identify and resolve equipment issues before they happened.

Anthony Veder aims to be an ambitious leader in gas shipping service solutions, which means consistently having tanker capacity availability with minimal downtime is critical. Additionally, having a predictive vibration monitoring service tracks the performance of expensive rotating assets, such as cargo pumps and cargo compressors, would help Anthony Veder proactively manage its capacity, prevent damage and keep maintenance costs in line.

The ships in the Anthony Veder fleet have a cargo plant to control the temperature of the cargo (liquified gas). The cargo plant is a foundational factor affecting each vessel’s availability. Maintaining the cargo at the required temperature is critical to transporting liquified gases, the cargo plant is a critical factor in this. High temperatures can cause liquefied gas to expand and become gas, jeopardizing the ships’ safety and transport capacity.

Seeking Out Proactive, Predictive Maintenance Approach

Originally, Anthony Veder was measuring assets’ vibration performance once every 30 months to plan the type of work that would be needed during each ship’s routine maintenance. The company instinctively knew that being able to proactively measure and manage assets’ operation within acceptable vibration ranges would help ensure the consistent availability of the capacity their customers wanted. Additionally, by resolving vibration issues quickly, Anthony Veder could prevent these issues becoming more impactful and expensive. 

Anthony Veder contacted I-care to better understand how to maintain and monitor the performance of its ship-board industrial assets using vibration measurements. While many companies could monitor certain types of assets, Anthony Veder’s inventory posed a difficult challenge. Assets from multiple manufacturers are installed on the ships without fleetwide standardization. In addition to the variety of assets in use, the company wanted to monitor all the assets’ performance from a single monitoring solution, Anthony Veder also wanted a scalable asset monitoring program that would be easy to roll out and use across the fleet. A flexible solution that would allow the company to add new assets and new performance metrics to be tracked was important as well. Ideally, Anthony Veder’s asset monitoring partner would need to arrive on Day One with a deep understanding of  the installed equipment and shipping. 

“Anthony Veder made it clear to us from the beginning that they wanted to see measurably less downtime due to mechanical breakdowns,” said Chris Kramer, Corporate Customer Care Manager, I-care. “That’s where we focused at first, and today we are helping them improve several key operations in their predictive maintenance program.”

Monitoring All Assets from a Single Platform

Anthony Veder chose I-care as its predictive maintenance partner for three key operational capabilities: being able to monitor any manufacturer’s asset from a single monitoring platform; the ability to accommodate a constantly expanding asset inventory; and the flexibility to adjust tracked performance metrics over time. 

Dubbed Project PriMa (Dutch for “good”), the Anthony Veder/I-care asset performance collaboration began with a one-ship pilot, where a handheld data collection tool was deployed to measure and report selected asset performance metrics. I-care’s expert analysis of the collected data identified the potential for significant bearing damage and other performance-related issues before they happened. These early warnings allowed Anthony Veder to replace compressors before they failed, improving the ships’ availability and helping the company deliver on its promise of consistently offering shipping capacity. 

Based on the success of the single-ship pilot, Anthony Veder instructed I-care to roll out data collection and asset monitoring on other assets in the cargo plants, including cargo pumps, and to expand monitoring coverage to a selection of their company vessels. More ships boarded the I-care solution later. Today, I-care oversees asset monitoring on 26 of Anthony Veder’s tankers.

Flagging Out-of-Range Performance

In addition to deploying its predictive maintenance service on the majority of Anthony Veder’s fleet, I-care is continuing to monitor the fleet for vibration maintenance issues and has begun working to improve the company’s reliability management efforts as well as its spare parts program. One aspect of asset operation that is of special interest to Anthony Veder is threshold-exceeding performance. I-care launched and manages above-threshold monitoring through resonance frequency testing, which continually tracks asset performance, alerting I-care whenever any asset operates above recommended thresholds. When an asset operates out-of-range, I-care flags the need for realignment to bring the asset’s performance back into an acceptable range. 

Anthony Veder has taken its predictive asset maintenance to a new level by using an always –available, cloud-based dashboard to graphically display key performance metrics, such as failure distribution by business unit and type, “back to green” timing and status, assets with the most “red” alerts and most “green-to-red” status and complete asset history. This visual display summarizes critical performance metrics by asset group and business unit, using a simple traffic-light color system to help quickly identify performance issues.  

For Anthony Veder, just-in-time maintenance prevents asset damage and helps to keep operational costs in line. More importantly, predictive maintenance ensures ships are available when the company’s customers need them. Delivering on its global promise to have capacity on demand means the world’s largest petrochemical producers can count on their products getting to where they need to be – even in the most remote locations of the world.