Abstract
M.Ing. (Engineering Management)
This research seeks to identify whether a plant’s life cycle is affected as a result of changing operational parameters. The research has been necessitated by the fact that despite great advancements in power plant operation and maintenance theory, South Africa’s coal fired power plants still experience high down time due changing operational conditions.
Submerged Scraper Conveyors (SSCs) have been identified as the equipment to be analysed for this research. They are critical for removal of Bottom Boiler Ash (BBA) from underneath coal fired power production units.
This research is a continuation of work done by Wiid and Sawa-Bialogorski (2005) who investigated the behavior of ash during transportation and dewatering in an SSC. In order to investigate these parameters, a 1/10 scale model based on the SSC installed at Kendal power station is built and experiments are conducted. Wiid and Sawa-Bialogorski have further conducted experiments on a full-scale SSC installed under a 660 MW boiler at Matimba power station.
This research is aimed at personnel involved at different phases of a plant’s life cycle as well as top management who set long term strategic goals for organizations. Findings of this research should highlight strategies which can be applied when organizations experience environmental changes which can affect plant life cycles.
From an SSC point of view, findings of this research can be used by plant operators, maintainers and system engineers to provide reliable SSC equipment. The body of knowledge of SSC equipment will be enhanced, and how they can be designed and operated efficiently in South African plants.
This research seeks to respond to the following main research questions:
Are systems’ life cycle phases interlinked by forwards and feedback loops which help ensure that parameters and constraints are always favourable to the system’s life cycle.
Is a system’s life cycle influenced by parameters and constraints found at different phases of the system’s life cycle?
In order to address the research questions, a literature survey is presented in chapter 2. The literature survey is split into three sub sections which focus on power producing plants, plant life cycle, and factors which cause changes to a plant’s life cycle...