TABLE OF CONTENTS When it's included as part of an overall corporate strategy, age exploration focuses corporate engineering on what matters. Issues of redesign, statistics, cost analysis, and new CMMS tools can help put engineering resources where they will add the greatest value.
Old and new facilities differ in their engineering design improvement needs. In the past, rapid advances in design, lowered unit costs, and load growth meant that engineering focused on construction. Plant lifetimes were short. "Disposable plants" were expected to be technically obsolete after 40 years in service. Such was the design standard. Today, plant replacement capital simply isn't available to old-line utilities. Traditional, vertically-integrated utility generating units, whether fossil or nuclear, are beset with high costs and complex processes, putting their continued existence at risk. The challenge is to redesign and re-deploy assets for competitive survival. When engineering groups lack the experience needed to effectively improve plant operations, utility engineering must turn to others-and this should not be the case.
A complete RCM review of a complex system establishing a maintenance "spectrum" quantifies optimum maintenance mix. At the extreme are systems that support heavy monitoring: they have a high number of random, low-consequence failures that don't (cost-effectively) support fixed-time maintenance. Personal computers many of them controlling many complex subsystems fit this profile. Overall, they fail randomly, but a quality machine's average age at failure it's MTBF is several years longer than prescribed useful life. It's highly probably the device will be technically obsolete (and taken OOS) before this point is reached. The...
