Mathematical modeling and transient analysis of boiler system in thermal power plant

Thermal power plants are the backbone of energy generation across the world. Power plant reliability is a growing concern for industrialized and economically developing nations. Boilers are essential components of thermal power plants. The primary goal of the present study is to investigate the operational availability behavior of a boiler system under the concept of cold standby redundancy. The boiler is a complex system having six subsystems configured in series configuration. The failure and repair rates of the systems are exponentially distributed and statistically independent. The Markov birth–death methodology is applied to derive the Chapman-Kolmogorov differential-difference equations. The transient availability of the boiler system is evaluated using the Ranga-kutta method of 4th order. Numerical results of system operational availability are derived for a particular case. The system achieves a transient availability of 0.999078 at 5-time units. To emphasize the significance of this study, numerical results for transient availability are calculated by applying a 50% increase and decrease in both failure and repair rates. The results are helpful for plant maintenance personnel in developing maintenance strategies. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Society for Reliability and Safety (SRESA) 2024.