A study and analysis of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) in the Energy Industry

This study presents the Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) in the energy industry; with the concept of reliability analysis carried out a real-life study of five (5) key components of a functional Gas Turbine (GT) located in Afam Power PLC in the South-South region of Nigeria. The study applies the reliability centered maintenance planning technique using computational methods to plan the maintenance schedule of the gas turbine plant. First, a maintenance cost function that reflects the present maintenance and operation conditions of the system’s components was derived. Second, an estimation of maintenance of the components of the GT using evolutionary algorithm (EA) was carried out, of which the desired subsystem reliability was determined, and maintenance reliability allocated.Third, a reliability growth analysis was used to derive the reliability indices. Two (2) optimization procedures were executed to ascertain the optimum reliability. The results showed that 16.2% maintenance cost was saved when the 2 optimization procedures were compared. A significant correlation between conflicting objectives was achieved by using these optimization procedures thereby converting them to a single optimization model.