Targeting Maintenance Spending Yields Impactful Results
Despite regular maintenance, the utility was experiencing precipitator performance issues, resulting in restricted power generation and undesirable opacity levels. Neundorfer worked with the plant to identify the sections that were contributing the most to the performance issues, and took advantage of a short outage to inspect the unit. Combing this process with an internal inspection, you have all the pieces needed to put a powerful plan together.
The next major outage provided the opportunity to make the priority repairs. The work was completed on-time, and on-budget. The end result, opacity was reduced 52% allowing the plant to run without restricted load.
Regular maintenance had been completed each outage, so it was hard to see how another round of maintenance would solve the problem. But, by using the data to drive the priorities, the desired results were realized.
Anymore, it doesn’t seem that there is enough time and money to fix everything within a unit. That doesn’t always mean you have to suffer with lower performance and reliability. It does mean that you have to use data to drive the plans. Using performance modeling and a good inspection, you can determine where the greatest gains can be made in performance and reliability. Then if you need to reduce your work scope, you know what results will be sacrificed with each change, allowing you to make more informed decisions.
It may seem that adding the analysis and inspection to outage planning adds cost to an already tight budget. But, knowing what work to complete, what it will take to complete it, and what results you can expect means you can prioritize the work based on its contribution to performance and reliability. And that can save you multiples.
