Fault-exploring based maintenance: A new maintenance strategy more than condition based maintenance

Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) has replaced Time Based Maintenance (TBM) and is becoming the mainstream maintenance strategy in power industry. According to the early warning signals based on device status monitoring, CBM gives out the maintenance strategies of different emergency levels. Though CBM improves the timeliness of maintenance in some extent compared to TBM, it still lags the occurrence of device faults. Another disadvantage of CBM is that it is not convenient to be applied to secondary devices such as relay protection systems especially HVDC control and protection systems in which the main problem is improper program logics and reference values. In this paper, the concept of Fault-exploring Based Maintenance(FBM) is proposed, which emphasizes specialized production employees´ active and day-to-day investigations of the possible troubles of all of devices in substations, is in advance of the occurrences of faults and especially effective for maintenance of secondary devices such as HVDC control and protection systems.