REDUCING UNPLANNED BOILER TUBE FAILURES IN COAL FIRED POWER PLANTS

摘要

Power plants are a complex and expensive asset to acquire and maintain. The corrective and preventive maintenance costs of plants are significant. Enterprise practitioners seek ideal best practice measures towards reducing escalating maintenance costs and power plant downtime. The cost of corrective maintenance, due downtime, relative to power generation is exorbitant. The result is a loss of electricity generation capacity. Numerous studies present literature exploring measures towards enhancing the availability and reliability of electricity generating plants. This paper focuses on reducing downtime in electricity generation plants, by reducing failures associated with boiler tubes. Best practice measures towards enhancing the reliability levels and availability of electricity generating units are considered. This research specifically explores boiler tube failures in coal-fired electricity generating plants. The research reviews literature relative to global best practices, employed by boiler operators, against high performing utilities. The research results are analyzed and highlight correlations between selected variables, Boiler Tube Failures (BTFs) and identified dominant failure mechanisms. This paper recommends critical benchmarks towards reducing downtime of unplanned boiler tube failures resulting in forced outages, in coal-fired electricity generating plant