SIRA Use Case: Detecting Major Fuel Leak

SIRA provides accurate insights to better manage equipment maintenance, by identifying when unexplained losses are observed at site triggering investigations.

Without this information, you might be overspending on maintenance, testing or fixing elements of your tank that were not actually causing any issues.

Let’s look at a practical example:

Recently, we helped one of our SIRA customers find a fill line leak during a SIRA loss investigation. 

The tank was on monthly monitoring and recorded a Fail result, so it was investigated to determine the cause of the losses. Stage 1 of the investigation found no issues with the administration practices at site and stage 2 found that all the meters at site were correctly calibrated.

Therefore, further analysis of the data was then conducted to decide if Stage 3 (tank and line testing) should be recommended.

Here is where the insights from the SIRA reports come into play. 

Looking at the average variance on days with a delivery compared with days without a delivery, we noticed that delivery days had an average loss of 130 litres per day (lpd), whereas non-delivery days had an average gain of 10 lpd, showing that the leak only occurs on delivery days.

Tank calibration had been ruled out, leaving the most likely scenarios of a leaking fill line or short deliveries.

Given these results and the consistently high losses, Stage 3 was recommended as well as stopping deliveries to this tank.

The tank and lines to pumps passed the pressure tests, but the fill line failed, confirming the initial theory which resulted in the site replacing the fill line.