Contemporary Maintenance Management of Power Plant Life Exhaustion Components

Abstract

Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) has a key role in the quality system of thermal power plants. Electricity production is definitely not only production of a product, but also becomes a customer service. Reliability is the top quality tier of this service. Incorporation in the Integrated energy system means fast transformations of organization on all levels. The reliability of modern generation components basically influences the efficiency and capacity of a power plant as a whole. This paper presents the results of RCM practice of one 620 MW thermal power plant. RCM implementation on current problems during exploitation emphasized problems with the boiler tubing system. The methodological approach included outages analyses, marking of the most significant ones, determination of main causes of damage (determination of the material exhaustion state based on expert analyses), application of adequate remaining life assessment methodology and finally the recommendations. Based on these analyses, certain technical solutions were performed and as a result, the mean time between failures of the plant increased, as well as its reliability. According to cost efficiency, RCM methodology presented the most effective cost-benefit method for reliability upgrade.