OPTIMIZING EQUIPMENT RELIABILITY IN A SUGAR MILL AND ETHANOL PLANT

Abstract

Introduction:
The production processes of raw sugar and ethyl alcohol are of great importance to the Cuban economy. At present, these industries have been affected by technological obsolescence and the lack of new technologies, which means that it is necessary to apply the reliability theory to correct these problems.
Objective:
To optimize reliability in the production of raw sugar and ethyl alcohol in a sugar mill and ethanol distillery.
Materials and Methods:
The proposed methodology considers a work diagram that is essentially based on obtaining operating time data without equipment failure, drawing up process reliability diagrams and determining the reliability of both systems. This allows to apply the NonLinear Programming of Integers (NLPI) method in Excel to obtain the optimal amount of equipment in each studied stage.
Results and Discussion:
The proposed methodology made it possible to obtain the optimum amount of units that must be placed at each stage of the raw sugar and ethanol manufacturing process.
Conclusions:
The current reliabilities of the plant and the distillery are 0.02517 and 0.1719 respectively, which are low figures due to the technological obsolescence of the equipment and its frequent breakages, which can be amended by assigning new
redundancies to the most vulnerable equipment. This methodology allowed for the first time to consider the availability of the facility through reliability analysis in the development strategy of a sugar factory as a biorefinery.