Operational and maintenance data collection

This article presents an effort to collect operational and maintenance data on 240 power generation, power distribution and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) items, including gas turbine generators, diesel engine generators, electrical switchgear, cables, circuit breakers, boilers, piping, valves, pumps, motors, and chillers. The information collected in this study will be useful in determining site reliability or availability. The actual value that is predicted for a specific system may not be totally definitive, but the comparisons between systems is of greater value. The data and procedure can be used in different manners to aid the facility designer and facility engineer. The designer can use the data to evaluate different designs. The designer can estimate the length of downtime by adding the failure time to the production or mission loss and can estimate the total length of time from line stop to line start as a result of failures. New designs or redesigns can be evaluated to minimize the production/mission failure with estimates on money saved by avoiding downtime. The engineer can estimate the downtimes associated with the systems or subsystems and compare these results to the actual times. This could identify problem areas that may need more (or less) maintenance time and systems that may benefit from redundancy or replacement.