Reliability and availability of a continuous casting plant

The continuous casting (CC) technique accounts for more than 60% of total liquid steel in the world. The main advantages of steel processing through the CC route are higher yield, lower energy consumption, elimination of primary mills. Since the CC plant is an integral part of most steel plants, therefore, the need for failure analysis of such a system wherein a CC plant is operating round the clock. The real data of a CC plant for four equipments viz. ladle handling crane 01, 02 and billet handling crane 01, 02 have been used for the purpose. Any one equipment failure brings the CC plant to a complete halt and stops the production. The critical equipment fails due to any one of the five types of failure as categorized in the data. The paper outlines the modeling strategy embedded by the types of failures actually depicted into data and important reliability indices such as the mean time to system failure and steady state availability are obtained using semi-Markov processes and regenerative point techniques. Graphs are essentially established to interpret the results.