AVAILABILITY ANALYSIS FOR IDENTIFICATION OF CRITICAL FACTOR OF A THERMAL POWER PLANT.

In the present stimulated business environment, power sector is playing a major role in the economic growth of India. During the last 20 years, the country had been facing a poor supply of energy and this supply-demand gap is increasing continuously. So, it is important for power plants to improve its power generation capacity drastically by reducing the failure rate. In the present paper, to analyze the causes of poor availability, thermal power plant has divided into six different systems and a system comprising of waste gases heating system has been considered. With the help of transition diagram, mathematical equations have been used to find out the availability. After analyzing, it was found that the value of availability is very low and boiler tube failure is one of the most critical factors for this low availability of system. Economizer zone has identified having long existence time of failures and frequency of occurrence is very high. So, minimizing the failure rate with the help of a proper maintenance schedule will result in decreasing the shutdown period of the plant and increasing the system availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]