Maintenance Scheduling of Distribution Reclosers Using RCM Techniques

At present, the maintenance of most reclosers uses time-based maintenance (TBM) strategies due to its easy plan for the maintenance schedule. However, the maintenance of such strategies is a relatively high cost due to unnecessary and redundant maintenance activities. Moreover, TBM cannot prevent some failure modes resulting in malfunctions before the maintenance cycle. To solve the above-mentioned problems, this paper presents a method of determining the maintenance scheduling of the reclosers using reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). The RCM is a way to define the maintenance schedule according to the critical level of each recloser by considering the results of the condition assessment, together with the importance of the reclosers. The 9-condition assessment criteria and the 2-importance assessment criteria have been established. The proposed method is applied to the distribution reclosers from the Phitsanulok 3 substation of the Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA). It is found from the study results that the proposed method provides the critical level of each recloser, the maintenance schedule can be grouped and set up appropriately.