Why Compressor Criticality Isn't Always Obvious Until It Fails

Sponsored by FS-Elliott

Centrifugal compressors sit at the core of operations across power generation, process, and industrial facilities, but how critical any single unit is often isn't obvious until something goes wrong. In this episode, Wael Al Mandarawi explains that criticality depends less on the compressor itself and more on the consequence of losing it, whether it directly supports production, instrumentation, or another essential utility, and whether redundancy exists to absorb a trip.

Al Mandarawi breaks criticality down into three perspectives: production impact, safety and environmental consequence, and recovery time from failure. He argues that life cycle planning shouldn't wait for a compressor to fail and that assessment should happen ahead of time and directly drive maintenance strategy selection.

For reliability engineers and plant managers building or refining a maintenance strategy, this episode offers a framework for evaluating criticality before it's tested by an unplanned outage.