A Method for Determining Appropriate Maintenance Intervals of Equipments in Thermal Power Stations

Reliable maintenance scheduling of main equipments is a crucial problem in thermal power stations in order to skirt overall losses of power generation resulted from severe failures of the equipments. A reasonable method was proposed to determine the maintenance scheduling of whole pump system in thermal power stations in order to reduce the maintenance cost by keeping the present avail-ability of the pump system throughout the operation. The dimensional reduction method was used to solve problems encountered due to few data which involved many operational factors in failure rate of pumps. The problem of bandlimited nature of data with time was solved by extrapolating future failures from presently available actual data with an aid of Weibull distribution. The results of the analysis identified the most suitable maintenance intervals of each pump type accordingly and hence reduce the cost of unnecessary maintenance with an acceptable range in the overall system availability.