Improving overhaul/replacement decisions

Conference · Tue Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1996

OSTI ID:549957

Witt, J H ^[1]; Gaidry, T H ^[2]

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1. Availability Systems, Inc., Riva, MD (United States)
2. Long Island Lighting Co., Melville, NY (United States)

The decision on when to overhaul or replace a major equipment in a power generation plant can have a large financial impact to a utility. An investigation of overhaul activities on a sampling of utility equipments indicated that a large percentage of overhauls were being performed on equipments that were exhibiting constant, or even growth, reliability characteristics; with the equipment nearly always showing an adverse effect on its reliability immediately after the overhaul and frequently never attaining the level of reliability that was exhibited prior to the overhaul. Further, these adverse effects frequently became greater with successive overhauls indicating that equipment replacement may have been the more cost-effective decision to have been taken. These findings led to the development of a methodology and implementing software that took into account the reliability trends being exhibited by the equipment, the effects of prior overhauls, and the expected costs of doing nothing (but failure repair) vs. overhaul vs. replacement. It was hypothesized that application of this methodology could significantly reduce the number of equipment overhauls being performed, improve the cost-effectiveness of the overhaul/replacement decisions, and result in significant cost savings to the utility employing it. This paper provides an overview of the methodology and reports on an initial test application of it using data from the Boiler Recirculation Pumps in four of Long Island Lighting Company`s steam units. The results indicated that substantial cost savings could be achieved with such a decision support tool.

• OSTI ID: 549957
• Report Number(s): CONF-961006--; ISBN 0-7918-1796-2
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS
COMPUTER CALCULATIONS
DECISION MAKING
ECONOMICS
ELECTRIC UTILITIES
MAINTENANCE
POWER PLANTS
RELIABILITY
REPAIR