Track: Engineering Economy

Abstract

This paper is an assessment of the cost to the Steam Plant Department of SASOL in Secunda on maintenance per outage per boiler on a weekly basis. All maintenance and contributing factors during a General Overhaul (GO) for a period of 48 months maintenance plan are carefully analyzed in this paper. The current cleaning technology which uses soot blowers proved to be the main contributor to the high costs due to its failure when the boiler is running, causing leaks and erosion on boiler tubes. As a result, there is a significantly high cost on superheater tubes with a variance of R29 704 191.18 from a budget of R50 919 502.53 in 14 days of a 90 days GO. The cost of soot blower repairs also exceeds the budgeted amount of R1 000000 by R428 884,73 in variance in 14 days of the GO. The results of metallographic examination of the tube used is presented in this paper. Based in this analysis a new maintenance method using an acoustics approach is proposed in this paper.