POWER-PLANT BOILER FEED SYSTEM RELIABILITY - A CASE-STUDY

This paper briefly considers the historical reliability of pump sets that feed water to the boilers of large power plants. Two pump sets out of three are required in order to achieve full output power load. The study excludes major overhauls and confines itself to unpredictable defects in pump sets that can cause disruptions. Failure and repair rates are estimated form historical data, and the system is modeled as a Markov process in order to compute its reliability. The availability of sufficient and reliable data appears to be a major obstacle in solving problems of this nature. The use of computers is required to solve the resulting set of first-order linear differential equations.