Strategy Selection for Reliability-Based Maintenance in Hydropower: A Case Study on Bijaypur-I Small Hydropower Plant

Abstract

This study presents the Strategy Selection for Reliability-Based Maintenance in Hydropower: A case study is being carried out within the scope of the master thesis of MSc in Technology and Innovation Management, under the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. This study is based on the case study of 4.5 MW Bijaypur- I Small Hydropower Plant located in Pokhara-Lekhnath Metropolitan city of Gandaki Provenance. The main objective of this study is to study the reliability and availability of the Bijayapur hydropower plant to find out the critical failure event that affects the reliability and availability of the plant and to recommend a maintenance strategy that can uplift the reliability and availability of the plant. This paper approaches the selection of a strategy for the implementation of reliability based maintenance, especially in hydropower. To achieve the above mention objectives, firstly the Fault Tree of Bijaypur-I small Hydropower plant was developed based on different failure events recorded on the maintenance log sheet. From the study of the past seven years' failure data of BSHP-I, the reliability and availability of the plant were analyzed. And by computing the fault tree the criticality of each event was determined to find the critical assets. And then suitable maintenance strategies were recommended with the help of Failure Mode and Effect Analysis technique and Critical Analysis Technique. The study concluded that the reliability of BSHP-I was only 0.986 which is lower than the Sunkoshi Hydropower Plant and the water management problem is the main contributing event and the cooling system was concluded as the main contributing component which is marked as critical assets. This study firstly concludes Radial Tube Filter choking is the main failure mode that affects the performance of the cooling system from Failure mode and effect analysis. And recommend the maintenance strategy for as a whole to the cooling system and also highlights some of the strategies