Advanced Maintenance Strategy for Power Plants - Introducing Intelligent Maintenance System

Maintenance activities play a key role in keeping performance, reliability and safety levels of generating facilities in power plants. Scheduled maintenance and imperfect condition-based maintenance often augmented by additional breakdown maintenance are the usual maintenance strategies employed by generating companies now in China. Recently, a new maintenance philosophy called as intelligent maintenance system was proposed. This paper describes the new advantages and characteristics of intelligent maintenance system, and shows the possible challenges to develop the intelligent maintenance system for generating equipment. The technologies of fault prognosis, maintenance scheduling and sensors etc. as the key elements of intelligent maintenance system in power plants are depicted in detail, and their future research directions are addressed respectively