Developing life cycle management plans for power plant components

A process to develop life cycle management (LCM) plans for power plant components is described. An LCM plan is a guide to make operational decision for a piece of equipment over its life cycle. An LCM typically consists of preventive maintenance schedule, condition monitoring and inspection activities, replacement or refurbishment plans and spares management. It is developed on the basis of component failure modes, operating history, maintenance practices, ageing, spares and obsolescence. Once an LCM plan has been formulated it can be compared with other alternative LCM strategies in order to minimize the long term costs over the plant lifetime. For this purpose, a program comprising of three modules is built using Excel VBA. The first module deals with failure rate estimation of a component based on right censored failure data. The second module attempts to estimate the impact of different preventive maintenance schedules on failure rates and the third module is a life cycle cost calculator which estimates the net present value of future costs over the plant lifetime.