A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Health Index Determination for a Gas-Insulated Switchgear

This paper presents a fuzzy logic approach, a simplified and adaptable method, to determine the health index of gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) bay and their compartments. Since the traditional weighting and scoring method (WSM) is a subjective method, the fuzzy logic approach has been applied to enhance the accuracy of the health index (HI) determination by evaluating the detectable degradation and the incorporated conditional factor (CF) considering actual operating conditions and invisible ageing. The input data are first obtained from routine inspection and time-based testing and then converted to numerical values as the fuzzy logic model input to compute the component HI. The bay HI values are further calculated by applying the WSM using the obtained component of the HI. Then, the accuracy of the obtained HI of the bay has been improved by multiplying with the CF to obtain the overall bay HI values. The proposed methodology was implemented in an independent power producer in a large industrial estate in Thailand to evaluate 175 GIS bays with actual data. The results were compared against other HI evaluation techniques with a satisfactory outcome. Finally, the overall bay HI is used to prioritize maintenance activity, to effectively allocate human resources, to prevent unplanned outages, and to achieve cost-effective, condition-based maintenance.