The use of condition monitoring information for maintenance planning and decision-making

A survey is presented outlining the use of condition monitoring information in three Nordic nuclear power plants. The questions of the survey relate to the role of condition monitoring in strategic, as well as operative, maintenance planning and decision-making. The survey indicates that condition monitoring is increasingly implemented at nuclear power plants, but very selectively and in a rather slow pace for predictive maintenance. A combined strategy of condition based maintenance and predetermined preventive maintenance is applied for important equipment such as main circulation pumps and steam turbines. A realistic aim is to reduce the number of costly or error prone maintenance and disassembling inspection activities by condition monitoring given that the approach enables a good diagnosis and prediction. Systematic follow-up and analysis of such condition monitoring information followed by a case-specific planning and decision making of timely and rightly directed maintenance actions can justify an extension of the intervals of a number of predetermined inspection, maintenance or periodic testing tasks. (au)