Performance Evaluation of Cost-Effective Risk and Reliability-Based Maintenance for Gas Turbine Power Plant

Abstract

The importance of power generation and distribution in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria cannot be overstressed. This study, therefore, carried out the performance analysis of the GT-18 Gas Turbine plant in a power generating company in Port Harcourt. Reliability and failure rate models were developed using the probability density function of Rayleigh’s distribution model to evaluate the reliability and failure rate of the gas turbine. Risk and reliability models were developed based on the maintenance cost model. The Particle swarm optimization technique was used for analysis. The results of the risk evaluation showed that the company incurred a cost of N45, 800,570 from equipment failure. It was found that the mean time between failures of the gas turbine is 4540 hours; the mean time to repair is 1300 hours, the failure rate is 0.0002827, the repair rate is 0.00077, the probability of failure is 0.9160, while the reliability of the system is 0.99. Furtherly, the particle swarm optimization result showed that at maximum performance, 86% power generation was obtained at a minimum cost of N16, 213,000.