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B3-105

Session 2004
CIGR

RELIABILITY CENTERED MAINTENANCE OF SUBSTATION EQUIPMENT IN FINGRID OYJ PASI YLI-SALOMKI* (Finland) TIMO KIIVERI

Fingrid Oyj

Summary This paper describes the experiencies and results of performing a reliability centered maintenance (RCM) analysis for substation transmission equipment. The RCM analysis was used to evaluate the maintenance policies of circuit-breakers, disconnectors and power transformers. Fault data helped to perform analyses by giving a valuable information of a long-term behaviour of equipment. As a result of the analyses some service intervals were extended. Keywords RCM - Fault Data - Substation Maintenance 1 Introduction

Fingrid is a Finnish transmission system operator and grid owner operating at the voltage levels of 400, 220 and 110 kV. It owns 99.5 per cent of the Finnish main grid and all the major interconnections. Fingrid has 14 000 km transmission lines and 104 substations. All the substations are unmanned. The company has in total 210 employees. The maintenance applied policy are defined internally by the company specialists. The policy is based on the experiencies and manufacturer recommendations. The actual maintenance work is purchased at market conditions from service providers. Due to the large geographical area (330 000 km2) the country is divided into nine regions. In each region there is a local substation supervisor. After competitive biddings for each region a long term contract (usually three years) is done for all basic maintenance, like simple inspections and services. For special maintenance tasks (e.g. circuit-breaker overhaul, OLTC service) short term contracts are used. 2 RCM approach

Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) was used in Fingrid to evaluate the maintenance policies of circuit-breakers, disconnectors and power transformers. These are the equipment with the biggest maintenance costs. This paper concentrates on the switching equipment only.
_______________________________________________________________________________________ *pasi.yli-salomaki@fingrid.fi

The former maintenance policy had been formed during a long period. New maintenance tasks had been added because of the occurred faults and of new maintenance methods but the maintenance policy had not been evaluated as a whole. It was seen useful to study the reasoning of the adopted maintenance strategy by analysing the applied policies and methods. Other goals of the analysis were to estimate the usability of the fault data collected during 10 years and to develop the fault statistics to serve better the maintenance development. A RCM analysis is usually done in the electric networks using two different approaches: equipment-oriented and system-oriented approach /1/. In the system-oriented approach a group of equipment or a small system is analysed. A system consists of a group of equipment which have a common purpose. In the equipment-oriented approach an analysis is done for a group of similar equipment with the same manufacturer and type. The significance of the equipment is taken into consideration by applying a separate importance classification. The analysis in Fingrid was made applying the equipment-oriented approach. The systemoriented approach was considered to demand too much resources. Because the equipment failures affect the reliability of the system level, the equipment-oriented approach was seen sufficient also from the system point of view. In a system approach a level of an analysis is usually kept higher than in an equipment-oriented approach in order to keep the size of the analysis moderate. Fingrid specialists define the maintenance tasks done by service providers. This provides the definitions of the maintenance tasks to be done at the enough low level which also makes an equipment-oriented approach more suitable. The analysis was done thoroughly to the most common type of the equipment in each equipment group. The result was used as a template to other corresponding equipment types but only the exceptions were recorded. The work group consisted of the company employees only. In addition to the leader the equipment specialist of the analysed equipment group and a local substation supervisor with the best knowledge of the analysed equipment belonged in the work group. The specialist had a more overall view of equipment and the local supervisor concentrated more on the practical issues. The leader studied the method, recorded the analyses and analysed the fault data. The composition of workgroups proved to be successful and effective. The extensive knowledge of the service providers was used in detailed questions. The analyses were documented in the Excel sheet. The fault consequences were evaluated with the chart which was based on the sheet introduced in the reference /2/. Many RCM cases have exploited separate numerical evaluation methods which are based on a frequency and seriousness of a failure mode and an applicability of a maintenance task. These kinds of methods were not used because they were considered to focus on numerical values which are very difficult to evaluate in a redundant transmission grid even with the extensive fault data. 3 History data

From the Finnish transmission grid equipment fault and maintenance data have been collected to the Elnet database during more than 10 years. Elnet is a comprehensive information system for maintenance, operation and planning of power transmission grid. In the database there are 3000 faults in equipment analysed by RCM. In the RCM analysis history data played an important role. In RCM maintenance tasks for each failure mode can be defined without history data. However, in determining an interval of a particular maintenance task history data supports remarkably. Fault data gives valuable information of the long-term performance of the equipment. The personal memory is emphasized to the faults experienced by the individual himself or to the faults which have occured recently. From the statistics it is

possible to notice that a picture of a frequency of a certain failure mode is sometimes erroneous. Type faults of a certain model are easy to distinguish. The used failure report in Elnet has fields with a list of predefined alternatives e.g. for a cause of a failure and a detection method. It is also possible to enter texts in free form. The fields with predefined alternatives gave only minor support in analysing data. They were general of nature which made type faults difficult to detect. A free fault description gave a detailed description of the nature of a fault. Unfortunately this meant that faults had to be analysed one by one individually. Based on the experiencies collected during the fault analysis the classification of some Elnetfields were changed in order to help the analysis of the faults in future. E.g. in case of a circuit-breaker a more detailed list of the damaged part was formed giving the possibility to indicate the equipment components which caused the loss of the function. 3.1 Circuit-breaker faults

The fault frequency of circuit-breakers depends on the type of circuit-breakers. The SF6 circuit-breakers have a smaller fault frequency than the minimum oil and air blast circuitbreakers. The sum of minor and major fault frequencies for different circuit-breaker types per circuit-breaker per year is presented in figure 1. The terms "major" and "minor" faults are defined as recommended by Cigre. The number of major faults correlates with the total number of faults. The fault frequencies experienced at different voltage levels do not vary notably.

0,3 Faults / equipment 0,25 0,2 0,15 0,1 0,05 0 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

SF6

Minimum oil

Air blast

Figure 1.

The faults of the circuit-breaker types 1993-2001.

The circuit-breaker type is not the only important factor. The new generation of the equipment seems to be more unreliable than the old ones. In the figure 2 the number of faults in 1999-2001 are presented per circuit-breaker in accordance with a commissioning year. The early SF6 circuit-breakers have had more faults than the minimum oil circuit-breakers commissioned at the same time.

0,1 Faults / equipment 0,08 0,06 0,04 0,02 0 19671971 19721976 19771981 19821986 19871991 19921996 19972001

Commissioning SF6 Minimum oil

Figure 2.

The faults 1999-2001 of the circuit-breaker types in accordance with a commissioning year.

From the fault data it was evaluated whether preventive maintenance methods currently used on site could detect major faults before their occurrence. The evaluation was based on fault character and descriptions and maintenance tasks done before a failure. A fault of a circuitbreaker was considered to be detectable if gradual changes occurred which could be detected visually, by means of a measurements or by inspections. On the other hand, it was evaluated that preventive maintenance cannot detect faults which are caused by a sudden break of a part in a control mechanisms or by a sudden gas leakage. 62 % of the faults were in the control mechanisms which makes the evaluation suggestive. According to evaluations 2/3 of circuitbreaker faults were such that their detection with preventive maintenance is difficult. In case of all line and transformer SF6 and minimum oil circuit-breakers it was also calculated how many years had gone from the previous offline service to the major or minor fault. The service interval of the previous mentioned circuit-breakers was four years. Figure 3 shows that at least with these service intervals the detection of faults is independent of the time passed.
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 0 1 2 3 Years from the service

Figure 3.

Number of faults

Time for the detection of circuit-breaker major faults from the last service.

3.2

Disconnectors

In case of disconnectors the nature of major faults is quite different which makes their detection easier. It was considered that maintenance can detect faults caused by a wrong adjustments, lack of grease or insulator defects. These are such faults where changes usually are clearly gradual. With the help of preventive maintenance only 1/5 of the faults were evaluated to be difficult to detect. 4 Results

As a result of the RCM analysis the service intervals were usually extended, e.g. for line SF6 circuit breakers the extensions were from two to eight years. The service extents also changed. A service consists of individual tasks. At the task level in many cases the task intervals were increased and the number of tasks were reduced. However, in some cases the new tasks were added and the individual task interval decreased. This is a case if e.g. an equipment had more than one service extent and a maintenance task was transferred to a more frequently performed task. The preventive maintenance cost reduction was estimated to be about 20 %. The reliability is considered to remain at the same level as earlier. This evaluation is based on the fault data. The detectable faults are often detected in visual inspections. The number of visual inspections was not reduced, but their contents were defined more accurately. In addition, some shorter maintenance task intervals and new tasks will hopefully help to detect faults earlier. The new service intervals and specifications were adopted at the beginning of the year 2003. A new method taken as a part of the regular maintenance policy is the service for a live 110 kV horizontal disconnector. In the analyses many assumptions were made of the fault frequencies and their behaviour. Validity of these assumptions will be evaluated very carefully in future from the failure cost and frequencies and the equipment condition before a service. 5 Conclusion

The RCM is suitable for determining and reviewing the maintenance policy of substation equipment. It is easy to apply and gives a good picture of the overall maintenance needs. As a result of the RCM procedure the maintenance requirements will be well documented. Fault analysis has already been used as a part of the normal maintenance development for a long time. However, RCM brings a systematic and more analytical approach. The fault and cost data should be used to follow up the effects of the new maintenance policy. References /1/ Girard A., Sarkinen R., de Radigues G., Landry M., Yamagata Y., Toyoda M., Giboulet A., Application of RCM method to high voltage systems including circuit breakers. Appendices D..D4 in CIGR report 165 Life management of circuit-breakers, 2000. /2/ Moubray J., Reliability-centered maintenance. Industrial Press Inc., New York, 2nd edition, 1997.