Title: Redundancy effect on coal-fired power plant availability

Authors: Ravinder Kumar

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Maharishi Markandeshwar University, Mullana, India

Abstract: The present study deals with the redundancy effect on operational availability of coal-fired power plant for known failure and repair rates of each component or unit in the system. For this purpose, the entire plant has been divided into four main subsystems (viz. boiler, turbine, condenser and water circulation) to predict operational availability (i.e., uptime) of these subsystems of large thermal power plant without the tangible nature of a transition diagram due to high complexity. Availability of each subsystem has been evaluated using well known Markov birth-death process in the present study. For the analysis, only the effect of redundancy on condensate extraction pump, boiler feed pump and boiler on operational availability of corresponding subsystem as well as plant has been discussed. The results predicted that the effect of boiler redundancy on coal-fired power plant found to be more sensitive in comparison to other redundant units.

Keywords: coal-fired power plants; redundancy effect; Markov birth-death process; operational availability; boiler redundancy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIE.2015.073458

International Journal of Intelligent Enterprise, 2015 Vol.3 No.1, pp.79 - 91

Received: 06 Mar 2015
Accepted: 26 Apr 2015
Published online: 09 Dec 2015 *

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