Determining the Value of Monitoring and Diagnostics

Conventional wisdom says that condition monitoring and on-line diagnostics of plant equipment and instrumentation and control systems can provide economic benefits to the nuclear utility. However, placing a dollar value on these benefits is difficult for a number of reasons. Maintenance crew sizes have a practical minimum to address staffing requirements. Reducing the amount of maintenance activity does not necessarily result in man-power savings. Regulatory constraints limit the extent to which probabilistic arguments can be relied on to avoid or defer preventive maintenance of safety-related equipment. Increasing the instrumentation of equipment to support advanced diagnostics can result in prohibitive hidden costs in change paperwork not to mention the direct cost of the sensors and cables. Although the use of wireless technology can offset this somewhat, without a clear understanding of the economic value of monitoring and diagnostics the utility has problems in deciding where its upgrade dollars are best spent; and the vendor has difficulty in developing products that delight the customer. In order to fill this gap in understanding, a workshop was held between monitoring and diagnostic experts at Westinghouse and utility representatives to define the value proposition for predictive diagnostics in operating plants. The objectives of this workshop were to: 1) determine where monitoring and diagnostics can be used to the benefit of the plant, 2) identify technologies available to apply to monitoring and diagnostics, 3) enumerate the barriers to installation of advanced monitoring and diagnostics, 4) establish value added propositions for efforts by the utility, by major vendors such as Westinghouse, and by sub-vendors, and 5) prioritize product development to provide the largest immediate benefit to the utilities. This paper discusses the outcome of that workshop and the directions of future developments in the area of monitoring and diagnostics of plant equipment and Instrumentation and Control.