Reliability-centred maintenance of MV circuit-breakers

The paper discusses the needs and advantages of reliability-centred maintenance as compared with other maintenance strategies for circuit-breakers. Two indications for the determination of maintenance sequence are selected, i.e. the technical condition index and the importance index with respect to the power supply. Different criteria are set up for the two indicators which must be assessed individually with weighting factors to cope with the different conditions in different utilities. Though it is comparatively easy to collect the different criteria, the selection of weighting factors offers a wide area for adaptation to the specific requirements of the maintenance personal. The procedure was applied to a 30 kV system and compared over a period of two years with the experience and preceding procedures of maintenance. The results were found suitable due to the individually adjusted weighting factors, thus the new reliability-centred maintenance strategy RCM will be applied in the future.