[2E8] Condition-based maintenance and borescope inspection of aeroderivative gas turbine
E Pereira
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
One of the primary tenets of the reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) approach is that maintenance activities should be focused towards preserving equipment functionality. It follows that the first step in analysing a particular piece of equipment is to identify the functional failures and describe the ways that the equipment may fail to perform its intended functions. Maintenance funding can then be aligned to those failures that have the highest rate and consequence. Generally speaking, most turbine maintenance programmes are not developed around a risk-based approach, but rather tailored towards original equipment manufacturer (OEM) guidance on a limited number of pieces of equipment within a package. While this may enable a system, or multiple systems, to run reliably, it does not optimise the overall plant reliability as a function of maintenance expenditure. As an example, the gas turbine combustion and hot section account for almost 80% of a typical maintenance budget, while being one of the smallest contributors to unplanned downtime. This paper gives details related to gas turbine maintenance to ensure safe and reliable operation, such as condition-based maintenance, L1 borescope inspection and L2 inspection. It also investigates the high temperature observed on different nozzles of the combustion chamber.
