Reliability strategy on feed pumps at Kriel Power Station

Abstract: Reactive maintenance responds quickly to unforeseen breakdowns and depends on emergency repairs to bring the plant back to operation. The effectiveness of any maintenance planning strongly depends on the availability of spares, time to repair, and availability of resources (such as man-power, tools such as fork lifts, cranes, availability of the plant to do the repairs, etc. necessary to do the work). For any plant that is ageing and designed such that long lead items are not localised in the country, it is necessary to find sound maintenance strategy methods that can be implemented to ensure availability and reliability of the running plant. Sound maintenance strategies are influenced by factors such as reliability of a system, which can be ensured by condition monitoring through data recorded over the performance of the plant, excellent spares management processes that include lead time to purchase or to repair, frequency of repairs, and having the sole supplier for strategic or critical spares, configuration management that allows an orderly development of any existing systems or sub-systems ensuring that no implementation of unauthorised modifications and original designs are traceable and documentation is controlled. The purpose of this dissertation was to provide a reliability strategy that could see the feed pumps move from reactive maintenance to proactive maintenance to predictive maintenance, which could ensure availability and efficiency of the pumps.M.Ing. (Engineering Management