MAINTENANCE

AND RELIABILITY
3 DIFF. INDUSTRIES
BY- DEEPANSHI JAISWAL
ABSTRACT

The purpose of this report is to provide with Maintenance and Reliability Model
for 3 different industries.: 1. A Case Study on Mission Critical Aircraft and Engine
Components ; 2. RCM Approach to Maintaining a Nuclear Power Plant ;
3.Application of Reliability Analysis on Maintenance Optimization in a coal
power station.
Maintenance being a key contributor, it is necessary to revisit maintenance
strategies and realign objectives of right maintenance, at right time and
on right equipment. Identification of right equipment is based on different
business critical attributes but the important ones are safety,
environmental and commercial. A right mix of various maintenance
options is selected depending upon operation envelope, state, redundancy,
replacement cost of the equipment. A right mix of preventive, corrective
and condition based maintenance followed by frequency optimization can
reduce maintenance cost significantly. A further reduction in maintenance
budget can be achieved through reduction of maintenance process waste
by streamlining work processes and increasing ratio of planned to
unplanned work through better work planning.
A Case Study on Mission Critical Aircraft and Engine Components

1
INTRODUCTION

One of the main driving force for a aircraft, whether military or civil is safety.
Aircrafts sure do stretches technology to their limits and as a result one can say
it is safest mode of transport. But also just one mistake could lead it to an
accident with the least surviving possibility and the most disastrous one. Still
the operators try their best to find a way to carry higher payloads using less fuel
often at higher speeds, but, of course, they do not want to lose their cargo or,
indeed, their aircraft, while keeping the cost to a minimum. This means that a
great deal of emphasis is placed on safety and reliability.
Maintenance accounts for about 10–15% of the operating cost. There's a term
“block hour” refers to the total usage of the equipment including flying and
taxing time. This means that there is considerable opportunity to improve
profits by removing unnecessary maintenance, without interrupting any other
function.

AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE
All aircrafts follow a maintenance program by FAA (Federal Aviation
Administration), CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) etc. Since every airline develops
their own maintenance plan based on the instruction or recommendations
given by the manufacturers thus, two airlines may have slightly different plans
for the same aircraft. Aircraft maintenance can be categorized as
1. Routine or scheduled maintenance
2. Non-routine or unplanned maintenance
3. Refurbishment
4. Modifications
Scheduled maintenance tasks are required at regular intervals, when life-
limited components (LLC) achieve the given age, or due to airworthiness
directives.
A Case Study on Mission Critical Aircraft and Engine Components

Routine maintenance can be classified as

1. Overnight maintenance
2. Hard time or life-limited maintenance
3. Progressive inspection

THE AIRLINE COMPANY PROFILE

Aircraft Alpha
Fleet size 16
Capacity 70–110 seats
Number of flights 1000 per week
Number of destinations 25
Speed 400 knots
Altitude 30,000 feet
Engine Gas turbine
Number of engines 4
Flight time 45 minutes to 2 hours

ENGINE RELIABILITY AND MAINTENANCE POLICIES

There are three causes of failure that are not age related: foreign object
damage, maintenance-induced failure, and [poor] quality control. In mechanical
components it's quite often that failure of once leads to another even when the
components are unrelated.
Low Minimum Issue life (MISL) would result in fewer parts being replaced
before they reach their hard life than would be the case for a higher MISL. A
component that has exceeded its soft life would be reconditioned/replaced the
next time the engine, in which it is installed, is removed for maintenance.
A Case Study on Mission Critical Aircraft and Engine Components

PLANNED AND UNPLANNED MAINTENANCE IN

ENGINE
Different maintenance policies not only affect the maintenance frequency but
also the service provider's expenditure. Replacing more components with new
ones will increase the expected time to next maintenance but will make the
current recovery more expensive. The decision on what additional work should
be done will have to take into account the time left for the current contract
(that is, when the hourly rate can next be changed), the components that have
to be replaced, and the ages and states of the remaining components. Due
consideration of the current financial state will also be required along with any
risks that may be associated with not meeting contractual requirements.

CONCLUSIONS

Despite such complex structure of aircrafts the fatalities are comparatively less
probably due the strict regulations followed. Even though western world still
sre looking forward to lessen these fatalities even more and penalize heavily to
those who don't follow them.
In this case study we see that most of the unscheduled maintenance is due to
no fault found (NFF). Current percentage of NFF: 40% which leads to failure of
planned maintenance. Universal test equipments lessens the stock of spare
parts rather than the number of NFF removals. Therefore diagnostics
capabilities need to be improved.
Engine components falls under NFF and here the number of unplanned
maintenance depends of MISl and soft life of the components.
 RCM APPROACH TO MAINTAINING A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

2
INTRODUCTION
The maintenance cost of energy generation plants directly depends on the
cost of utilities. To optimize the maintenance tasks, a maintenance policy
based on reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) was selected to maintain
about 450 systems constituting a nuclear power plant, in keeping, of course,
with the required safety and reliability levels set by the regulatory body. The
test case presented in this chapter deals with the charging pumps subsystem
of chemical and volume control system (CVCS).The main function of the CVCS
system is to inject water in the primary circuit in case of loss of coolant
accident (LOCA) to prevent core meltdown. Due to the wide variety of
components to be maintained, the CVCS system was selected first as a pilot
project to evaluate the efficiency of a maintenance policy based on RCM.

SYSTEM CHARACTERIZATION AND MODELING

 RCM APPROACH TO MAINTAINING A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

System Limits and Boundaries Identification

Guidelines for delineating the charging subsystem are:
1. Air supplies are bounded by the solenoid.
2. The breaker is included in the system but not the bus.
3. The entire instrumentation loop is included in the study.
4. All the controlled components and their associated I&C must be included
within the system boundaries.
System Function Identification and Definition
For the charging pumps subsystem, the following functions were taken into
account for functional safety-related failures:
Provide flow to the reactor injection system during safety injection.
Contain the primary fluid during safety injection.
Provide flow to the charging line or at the #1 seals of the primary pumps.
Contain the primary fluid under accidental situation without safety
injection.

RCM CONCEPTS
RCM methodology aims to identify components whose failures and
degradations induce loss or degradation of functions performed by the most
important systems of an industrial process or cause appreciable maintenance
expenditures. RCM methodology involves a systematic and logical consideration
of the following
1. System, subsystem, or component functions
2. Failure modes of each function
3. Importance associated with the function and its failure
4. Prioritizing process that identifies the PM tasks that cost effectively reduce
failure occurrence.
RCM Benefits
The nature and results of the RCM process yield several benefits: (i) direct
maintenance costs reduction by minimizing corrective maintenance and
reducing preventive maintenance, (ii) process availability and efficiency
improvement by reducing production losses, and (iii) optimization of process
resources and organization
.
 RCM APPROACH TO MAINTAINING A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

RCM Analysis Procedure

The requirements of the initial RCM analysis includes several major steps:
1. Process partitioning into systems
2. Defining the system boundaries
3. Defining the important functions of the system
4. Identifying the dominant system functional failure modes
5. Determining the critical components responsible for the system functional
failure modes
6. Identifying applicable and effective tasks that can prevent the failures and
monitor the degradation mechanisms of critical components, based on actual
or potential equipment failure and equipment failure mechanisms
7. Preventive maintenance implementation
8. Implementation of maintenance indicators in the frame of the “RCM living
program."

RCM maintenance program rely essentially on the accuracy and the

completeness of the definitions of the criteria associated with:
1. Function definitions
2. Selection of system failure modes
3. Selection of the critical components
4. Criticality of critical component failure mode
5. Applicability of maintenance tasks
6. Effectiveness of maintenance tasks
7. Decision logic tree for PM task selection
8. Selection of maintenance intervalam
RCM Limitations
RCM can address only those problems arising from inadequate, incorrect,
ineffective, or redundant maintenance tasks and can't really solve all of process
reliability or operations and maintenance expenditure problems. Also RCM
cannot do much in case when the problem is mainly due the errors made by
humans such as selecting wrong tools or poorly trained staff.
 RCM APPROACH TO MAINTAINING A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

RCM Living Program

The RCM living program is a continuous program having duration strictly
related to the life cycle of the systems, structures, and components of the
industrial process. A successful RCM living program needs to be evaluated for
about 3-4 years and also requires a dedicated organization.
Assessment of RCM effectiveness using them directly or indirectly is difficult for
several reasons: (i) Improvements in process availability and safety due to PM
tasks implemented as the result of the RCM program take several years to
become evident. (ii) Because so many factors directly or indirectly affect overall
process safety and economy, attributing any credit to the RCM implementation
requires careful analysis and quantification of the effects of the following:
1. Maintenance outage delays
2. Human errors
3. PM task implementation effectiveness
4. Organizational problems
5. Equipment or operating procedure modifications
6. New regulatory commitments
7. Unanticipated failure mechanisms

CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion, the objectives and results obtained after several years of RCM
implementation using the RCM analysis described in this chapter has fully
demonstrated that reliability-centered maintenance is a viable and effective
way to maintain an asset. The optimization of the preventive activities tasks,
keeping the same level of reliability and availability, will allow many
maintenance managers to rethink their maintenance practices.
APPLICATION OF RELIABILITY ANALYSIS ON MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION IN A COAL
POWER STATION.

INTRODUCTION 3
The key objective of this case study is to demonstrate usage of simple
reliability tools in maintenance optimization. The data used in the case study
has originated from a coal fired power station which was built in early sixties.
Flue Gas desulphurization (FGD) plant was retrofitted in nineties to meet the
legislative requirements of large combustion plant directive. The prevalent
time based preventive maintenance which even does not take into account
the operational regime of equipment or hours clocked was never challenged
in last 15 years. However recent the budget challenges by management and
changing market has forced engineers to seriously review the prevailing
maintenance strategies on plant.

PROCESS ADOPTED
Everyone looks for a strategy which uses right tools but is also simple to
understand where reliability engineering lacks due to it's mathematical
calculations.
A review on maintenance strategy can be structured against following common
questions:-
What is the desired outcome of maintenance
activity
What is the desired availability and expected plant utilization
What is the state of plant and machinery?
APPLICATION OF RELIABILITY ANALYSIS ON MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION IN A COAL
POWER STATION.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Non Parametric Analysis

The slope doesn't show any variation which means that the maintenance
system is keeping the failure constant.

Parametric Analysis
2 parameter Weibull distributions is well fitted which is indicated by lower
value of Anderson Darling coefficient. The shape factor .9 recommends
condition monitoring and no overhauls because of random failures.
APPLICATION OF RELIABILITY ANALYSIS ON MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION IN A COAL
POWER STATION.

Preventive maintenance interval

Optimum cost will be at the intersection of cost of maint. and cost of repair.
But this method is limited since cost of repair depends on no. of factors.

Condition based maintenance frequency

PF curves shows equipment undergoing a set of stages before it's
breakdown. So if we predict the time between starting stage of failure and
breakdown we can minimize the repair cost. Different monitoring
frequencies are recommended for different stages.
APPLICATION OF RELIABILITY ANALYSIS ON MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION IN A COAL
POWER STATION.

Maintenance Budget (A simple Model for common plant Pumps)

A forecast is made based on the existing market which is then transferred
into revenue or capital by different functional groups with keeping the
future into consideration.

Budget with Recommended Case

The recommended maintenance scheme for centrifugal pumps is condition
monitoring after two months and inspection of volute, impeller and
mechanical seal after 5 years for all pumps except limestone slurry
distribution pump after 2 years in view of large number of defects and
adverse operating conditions. A simulation run predicts budget for this
island to be between £10K and £20K. The main driver in this case is
predictive maintenance which can be reviewed further after implementation.
APPLICATION OF RELIABILITY ANALYSIS ON MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION IN A COAL
POWER STATION.

Present Maintenance
The present maintenance scheme cost ranges between £10 K and £52K the
maintenance scheme has been structured on condition monitoring after 2
weeks, Visual inspection after 16 weeks, intrusive inspections at 48weeks
and 96 weeks. Most of the plant is with constant hazard rate and Weibull
parameters of less than equal to 1.0 which does not warrant any preventive
maintenance.
APPLICATION OF RELIABILITY ANALYSIS ON MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION IN A COAL
POWER STATION.

Present maintenance Cost(£) Proposed maintenance cost(£)

Min =9,900 Min=10,488
Mean=26,000 Mean=16,000
Max= 52,251 Max=22,204

CONCLUSION
Weibull is a strong tool even though failures are random Weibull is capable
to identify which equipment is entering wear zone.
This case study shows that how a change in the maintenance strategy and
correct use of reliability and Weibull tools can save upto 10-30K on just one
equipment. The same strategy can be used in different parts of the plant and
can save us from unnecessary maintenance.

REFERENCES
https://fliphtml5.com/lnym/njof/basic/401-450 - Case study no. 17 and 20

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328420154_A_case_study_on_App
lication_of_Reliability_Analysis_in_Maintenance_OptimisationR4