4 benefits of a sound maintenance program

My friends at Asian Power asked if I would do another article so I decided to do a follow up to my May article on Rotating Equipment Condition Monitoring and Condition Based Maintenance (CBM), in May 2012.

It is a proven fact that a well developed and executed Maintenance Program will result in lower overall maintenance costs and higher generated revenue through increased reliability and availability.

However this is a difficult fact to sell to operators. I believe the reason is due to the way most operating budgets are structured. Development and execution of the Maintenance Program including Operating and Maintenance Training along with the key actions I discussed my previous article: Condition Monitoring; Trending; Analysis; and Root Cause Analysis of trips and failures has a cost which is higher than just normal maintenance activities.

This higher cost is normally charged to the Plant Operations budget. In typical Plants there is no mechanism to measure this higher cost against un-needed maintenance activities and loss of revenue due to equipment trips, unscheduled outages, and failures.

The key then is the Program requires not just the backing of Operations but buy-in by upper Management and Finance. Finance should love the Program due to the increased production due to higher equipment reliability and availability and lower incidents of unscheduled maintenance and failures which are difficult to budget for.

One key part of the Program which I did not stress in the previous article is training of Operations & Maintenance personnel. Supervisors and O&M personnel must not only understand the Program and its importance but also the operation of the equipment they are working on and what can be the consequences of improper maintenance and operating procedures.

To illustrate here are two real life examples of the many very costly poor maintenance activities I have seen:

• A Steam Turbine Generator having a frequent problem with over speed trips. Rather than performing a root cause analysis of the true cause the maintenance personnel de-activated the over speed trip switch. Result was the Turbine went into over speed and spun the generator rotor out the backend into the parking lot also destroying the Turbine
• An LM2500 Gas Turbine operating on diesel fuel experienced several fail to starts. Without a no ignition purge cycle another start was attempted which this time was successful resulting in an internal explosion which destroyed the Turbine Section and the Exhaust Collector

To gain the maximum benefit possible maintenance must be performed under a well planned and structured Program. The Program should be specifically tailored to the equipment operating requirements and environment. Examples of conditions that should be considered in developing the Program are:

• Full load or part load operation; number of starts and stops; normal ambient temperatures; harsh or clean environment; fuel or steam quality; critically of the operation or cost of unscheduled downtime which should be used for setting spares inventory levels.

Development of the Program should include: OEM recommendations; analysis of past operating history; personnel skill and training levels; spares stocking levels. The program should be continually reviewed against data generated from the CBM Program for needed revisions that can lower costs and make improvements.

What are the benefits of a Planned and Structured Maintenance Program
The benefits are what all operators are looking for:

1. Increased reliability and availability
2. Maximized production output
3. Lower maintenance costs
4. Lower inventory stocking costs