Last week, we covered 2 important aspects of maintenance required on a solar PV plant in Preventive maintenance and Administration of maintenance. This week, we will be covering Corrective maintenance. It will be explained in detail below-
Corrective Maintenance:
Corrective Maintenance is required to restore the harm or exchange of failed components. It is feasible to function some corrective upkeep such as inverter resets or communications resets remotely. It covers the activities performed by the Maintenance team in order to restore a PV plant system, equipment or component to a status where it can perform the required function.
Corrective Maintenance includes –
1. Fault Diagnosis: Also called troubleshooting to identify fault cause and localization. A monitoring solution like TrackSo helps in fault and anomaly diagnosis by providing high-frequency data of the assets present on the solar PV site so that the problems can be tracked at an early stage and solved accordingly.
2.Temporary Repair: to restore the required function of a faulty item for a limited time, until a Repair is carried out
3. Repair: to restore the required function permanently
The scope of Corrective Maintenance activities and its “border” or definition with respect to Preventive Maintenance requires specific attention and it should be properly defined in the maintenance contract. For easier understanding, an example is presented below:
Example- A cable termination tightening activity using a torque device for the correct fixation should be under the Preventive Maintenance scope of works, but depending on the quantity and/or frequency, it could be considered a Corrective Maintenance activity.
Corrective maintenance is a reactive measure and it takes place after a failure detection either by remote monitoring and supervision or during regular inspections and specific measurement activities. A major benefit of practising corrective maintenance is that it helps solve a live problem at the site so that operations can continue functioning smoothly. And although a certain amount of reactive maintenance will likely be necessary over the course of a plant’s 20-year lifetime, it can be lessened through more proactive Preventive Maintenance and condition-based maintenance strategies.
