Principles Reshaken

Industrial decision-making was never strictly engineering.

First, customers decide on the products. If the market wants eg. tatoo-guns, they shall be manufactured , even if the product is nonsense. Secondly , corporate games prevail in the managment over healthy reason.

Thirdly - copying competition makes individual planning difficult.

But , in recent years , another aspect moved to the front - equipment failures.

Let's consider simple plant with one process reactor. Reactor is supplied with high pressure process gas. Drive of the compressor takes a lot of costly electric power. On the other hand , the reactor produces plenty of waste heat, although sometimes low- temp. Some thirty years ago, the process designer would not hesitate- he would install a small boiler, small&cheap steam turbine and drive the compressor for free.

But , thirty years ago , there were a few hundred makers of small steam turbines worldwide. Today, perhaps a dozen are left. Technology, basically unchanged since a century, once considered low-tech, is today regarded as high, subject to costly LTSA ( long term service agreements) , outsourced of course. LTSA's reflect more angsts of the equipment owner than real technical need. If any third party intentionally wants to damage the machine, it won't help.

So, we came to the point: what machine or plant is more difficult to get damaged , even remotely ? The answer needs some deeper thinking, but principles seem as follows: less degrees of freedom; less parts; robust, oversized mechanical components; slow-running; fire-proof materials; hard-wired instead of software-relayed; eliminated weak points where mechanical, thermal or el-mag energy is transferred over narrow bridges; doubled all connections; redundancy wherever possible; electric cables tripled in size; electric switches el-mag instead of electronic; etc , etc... Easy to say.

The problem seems similar to police-and-bandits problem; the easiest way to solve would be to put all the bandits to jail and dissolve the police, save money.

But , always new are born, crescendo...