Developing of Reliability-Centered Maintenance Methodology in Second Power Plant of South Baghdad

Electric equipments of power station must be operated in the state of high reliability with its responsibility in the seamless power supply. Maintenance is one of the important and most costly phases in the lifecycle of any power generation systems, to improve maintenance management and system reliability and maintain the continuity of work of the system. Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) is one of the most recent maintenance techniques. In this research, an enhanced RCM methodology based on quantitative relationships implemented at system component level and the overall system reliability was applied to identify the distribution components that are critical to system reliability. Only unit one of the Second Power Plant of South Baghdad were selected as a case study in this research application. The major contribution of the study is to create a maintenance plan through applying statistical, historical data to generate a failure probability distribution model by using the combined methods of Failure Mode of Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). Evaluation criteria and matrixes of criticality are used to evaluate the criticality level of failure modes. The overall approach developed offers a cost-effective model, which can be applied prior to testing and inspection procedures during the RCM application. The results obtained from this case study show that the application of proposed RCM methodology based on preventive maintenance planning will decrease the total cost value of maintenance about 463469.85 $. That Indicates saving about 59% of the total downtime cost compared with current maintenance. As well as Proposed maintenance program reduce the required time to repair the plant components annually at a rate 6 day so that represent that the labor cost will minimized about 6424 $.