Availability Analysis of Gas Turbines Used in Power Plants

Abstract

The availability of a complex system, such as a gas turbine, is strongly associated with its parts reliability and maintenance policy. That policy not only has influence on the parts’ repair time but also on the parts’ reliability affecting the system degradation and availability. This study presents a method for reliability and availability evaluation of gas turbines installed in an electric power station. The method is based on system reliability concepts, such as functional tree development, application of failure mode and effects analysis to identify critical components for improvement of system reliability, and reliability and maintainability evaluation based on a historical failure database. The method also proposes the application of Reliability Centered Maintenance concepts to improve complex system maintenance policies aimed at the reduction of unexpected failure occurrences in critical components. The method is applied to the analysis of two F series gas turbines, each with an output of 150 MW, installed in a 500 MW combined cycle power plant. The reliability and availability of the turbines are simulated based on a five-year failure database. The availability analysis shows different results for each turbine, one presenting 99% and the other 96% availability, indicating differences in their systems installation and operation.

Keywords

• availability, gas turbines, maintainability, RCM and reliability simulation