Study of cost benefits of identification of non-problems with infrared thermography
- PECO Energy Co., Philadelphia, PA (United States)
Justifying the costs of starting and maintaining an in-house infrared thermography program is essential in ensuring continued funding and sponsorship. Cost benefit studies, whether brief and general, or strictly formalized, tend to focus on costs associated with projected equipment failure and production downtime. While these numbers can be quite dramatic, their validity rests on acceptance of the predicted failure which is inevitably the subject of some conjecture. Sometimes overlooked in these cost benefit analyses is the savings from avoided work through the optimization of routine time-directed tasks and the identification of non-problems. This includes condition based maintenance superseding preventive maintenance, and the value of including thermography in the troubleshooting process of known or suspected equipment performance problems. Using thermography inspection results to direct maintenance to the root cause of a performance problem can shorten downtime and eliminate unnecessary work and material expenditure. Cost benefit analysis of this type of inspection can be considered ``hard dollars,`` that is to say, that the money saved can be accurately calculated based on the repair costs which would normally have taken place if the information from the infrared thermography inspection had not been available. This type of savings, when presented to the administrator of the predictive maintenance program or the head of the maintenance department, represents real savings which are uncontestable in contrast to the postulated failure scenario calculations. This cost benefit analysis was done for PECO`s nuclear units.
- OSTI ID:
- 220693
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-940449-; ISBN 0-8194-1549-9; TRN: IM9620%%87
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers conference on intelligent information systems, Orlando, FL (United States), 4-8 Apr 1994; Other Information: PBD: 1994; Related Information: Is Part Of Thermosense 16: An international conference on thermal sensing and imaging diagnostic applications; Snell, J.R. Jr. [ed.]; PB: 330 p.; Proceedings/SPIE, Volume 2245
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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