Title: Effect of various pump hot-cold redundancy on availability of thermal power plant subsystems

Authors: Ravinder Kumar; Avdhesh Kr. Sharma; P.C. Tewari

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Maharishi Markandeshwar University, Mullana, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, D.C.R. University of Science and Technology, Murthal, Sonepat, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, N.I.T. Kurukshetra, Haryana, India

Abstract: The present paper deals with the effect of pump hot-cold redundancy on availability of various subsystems in a thermal power plant. For analysis two subsystems of thermal power plant have been considered in the present study, i.e., condensate subsystem and water circulation comprising of condensate extraction pumps and boiler feed pumps as hot-cold redundant units respectively. Each subsystem was further sub-divided into a number of units and sub-units or components. Operational availability of both subsystems has been evaluated using Markov birth-death process with various pumps redundancy levels. For availability prediction, the state transition diagrams of two subsystems (i.e., water circulation and condensate subsystem) with various pumps redundancy levels were prepared. The results predict that from an economic point of view, availability of water circulation and condensate subsystem found to be 0.9036 and 0.99 by using two numbers of boiler feed pump and condensate extraction pump in each subsystem respectively based on failure/repair rate data retrieved from different sources. Hence, the results are beneficial for the plant management from the economic point of view.

Keywords: hot-cold redundancy; availability analysis; thermal power plants; transition diagram; Markov birth-death process; pump systems; power plant subsystems; water circulation; condensate extraction pumps; boiler feed pumps; operational availability; pump redundancy levels; failure rates; repair rates; plant management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIE.2014.069073

International Journal of Intelligent Enterprise, 2014 Vol.2 No.4, pp.311 - 324

Received: 22 Apr 2014
Accepted: 15 Oct 2014

Published online: 30 Apr 2015 *

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