On-site refurbishment of electrical equipment - battery charger example

Power plants use many different types of electrical, mechanical and instrumentation type equipment to safely, reliably and efficiently produce electricity. What separates the nuclear industry from other industries is the age of the installed equipment and the rate of new technology used within the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry has done an excellent job in maintaining extremely old equipment. This is due to the cost associated with changing out plant essential or safety related equipment with newer technology equipment. The cost of the Design Change Package (DCP) and the cost of any necessary field changes is in many cases prohibitive even though the newer equipment has many added benefits over the originally installed equipment. Adding to the severity of the problem is the need to improve the reliability of the various plant systems while performing more maintenance on-line and less during outages all with a smaller staff. This situation dictates more refurbishment of existing equipment tasks rather then costly replacement. How can this be done with a smaller plant production staff, often with lessening equipment knowledge, during short critical plant outage windows? This paper will address these issues by using the on-site refurbishment of safety related battery chargers as an example. The on-site battery charger refurbishment included the following activities: Identification of parts needed for replacement. Identification of emergent parts needed even though not planned for. Staging and testing of necessary parts. Inspection, cleaning, repair and parts replacement in battery chargers. Post refurbishment battery charging performance testing. Battery charger return to service. The paper will detail how the plant production staff worked in concert with the OEM to plan, stage, refurbish, test and return to service the battery chargers during a critical outage window. The global lessons learned for all joint effort on-site refurbishment programs shall be discussed. (author)