Reliability centred maintenance in a thermal power plant: a case study

In the era of global competition, almost all the power, processing and manufacturing sectors are required to reduce their overall cost while maintaining the value and reliability of their assets. The electric power utilities are also active in looking for effective ways to improve the economic efficiency. One area, in particular, the equipment maintenance, is being scrutinised for reducing costs while keeping the overall reliable system. The use of reliability centred maintenance (RCM) can help these utilities to develop a systematic maintenance programme to meet these requirements in a cost‐effective manner. This paper presents an extensive review of different applications of RCM and is intended as a guide in exploring the feasible areas of successful implementation of RCM to a thermal plant. A case study of the outage review data of a thermal power plant in Punjab has been done to single out vital few reasons of forced outages and feasibility of implementation of RCM has also been discussed.