Análise das métricas de confiabilidade do regulador de velocidade de uma usina hidrelétrica

Abstract

According to ANEEL, 60% of Brazil's electricity comes from hydroelectric dams. The generation process of this energy has some complexity and is related to the availability of generators. The application of the reliability engineering study tries to increase the availability of these assets, reducing the probability of equipment failures and, consequently, repair costs and revenue losses over the time the machine has been turned off due to failures. This work’s goal is to analyze the reliability behavior of a speed regulator of a hydroelectric power plant unit using the reliability metrics, while the maintenance team uses the root cause analysis methodology to solve the faults. The collected and treated data were entered into Reliasoft's Weibull++ software to obtain the Failure Probability Density and Accumulated Failure Probability, Reliability, Failure Rate, and Mean Time Between Failures functions. These results allowed a comparative analysis of reliability performance for the years of 2016, 2017 and 2018. A significant increase in system reliability was perceived and it was concluded that the application of Reliability Engineering supports the evaluation of equipment performance and setting goals for failure treatment. Using Reliability Engineering combined with a failure analysis method to find the root cause has allowed the maintenance team to intervene assertively in the equipment, increasing system reliability and overall availability.