Behavioral Analysis of Cooling Tower in Steam Turbine Power Plant using Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Dependability Investigation
Nivedita Gupta, Monika Saini, Ashish Kumar
Abstract
The main objective of present study is to provide a novel technique for identification of most critical component of cooling tower in steam turbine power plant. In steam turbine power plants various subsystems works in a series structure out of which cooling tower plays a prominent role in operation of plant. Cooling tower is comprised using six components in series structure. In present analysis, reliability, availability, maintainability and dependability (RAMD) approach has been utilized to find the performance measures of the cooling tower. Markov birth death process has been used to develop mathematical models for each component of cooling tower. Chapman Kolmogorov differential equations for each component has been formulated. All failure and repair time random variables follow exponential distribution, and all are statistically independent. Sufficient repair facility always remains with system. The numerical results for reliability, maintainability, dependability and steady state availability for different components of cooling tower have been derived. Other measures such as mean time to failure (MTTF), mean time to repair (MTTR) and dependability ratio, which help us to predict system performance has also been calculated. Numerical analysis reflects that availability of the system is 0.9775468, reliability of the system after 10 months is 0.703280 and become 0.085094 after 70 months. Maintainability of the system is 0.997239 and Dependability is 0.977985. Through, the derived numerical results operational performance of cooling tower has been assessed and it is recommended that findings are very useful for designers and maintenance engineers of cooling tower.