A PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF P-F CURVES AND DORMANT FAILURE MODELS TO ESTIMATE THE IMPACT OF INSPECTION INTERVAL ON AVAILABILITY OF POWER GENERATION PLANTS

摘要

It’s possible to enumerate at least two reasons to carry out inspections in power generation: (1) to reveal a dormant failure of equipment and (2) to identify some characteristics that suggest that a failure is about to happen as, for instance, when a vibration analysis identifies some abnormal behavior before any bigger problem. This paper discusses the statistical modeling and the difficulties in real situations to analyze the impacts of different inspection plans in system availability of a hydroelectric power plant. With the simulation of different scenarios, decision-makers are able to choose the strategy that best fits the budget constraints and the requirement of system’s performance. These results have been used in a real power generation plant to implement new maintenance policies.