Defining the life of major assets

The international trend is for power utilities having major capital equipment with service ages in excess of their assigned lifetimes. The key role for the asset manager in this situation is to be able to define the risks for future operation. This will then permit criticality based decisions for managing future operating and capital expenditure. The first step is to define relevant failure modes and from that the range of realistic life expectancies. This paper concentrates on the power transformer where key life determinants are indeed age related, but more dependent on the design and build quality together with operational utilisation rather than a simple ubiquitous ldquotime at temperaturerdquo ageing factor.