2012 – Justifiable Maintenance – Reliability Centred Maintenance of Dam and Weir Assets

Steven Hare, Daniel Masters, Phil Farnik

State Water Corporation, New South Wales’ bulk water delivery business, is enhancing its maintenance planning and execution through a maintenance improvement project. This project incorporates a Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) analysis of water infrastructure assets including dams, weirs and pipelines and refining current maintenance procedures.
The project aims to address inconsistencies in maintenance frequencies and applications that have resulted from historically managing assets at a regional level. This project, coupled with State Water’s new “functional based” organisational structure, is expected to yield an effective and consistent preventive maintenance program across the organisation. The project is also expected to increase the reliability of critical dam infrastructure and aid in maintaining safe operation of the organisation’s assets.
This paper briefly describes the history of maintenance, principles of RCM, project implementation aspects and early outcomes. These outcomes include the reduction of maintenance frequencies on non safety critical assets with low failure rates, elimination of ineffective tasks and standardisation of maintenance frequencies on equipment common to all dam sites.
Keywords: Reliability centred maintenance, dams, weirs