In the present stimulated business environment, power sector is playing a major role in the economic growth of India. During the last 20 years, the country had been facing a poor supply of energy and this supply-demand gap is increasing continuously. Therefore, it is important for power plants to improve its power generation capacity drastically by reducing the failure rate. In the present paper, to analyze the causes of poor availability, thermal power plant has divided into six different systems and a system comprising waste gases heating system has been considered. With the help of transition diagram, mathematical equations have been used to find out the availability. After analyzing, it was found that the value of availability is very low and boiler tube failure is one of the most critical factors for this low availability of system. The power plants have low availability causing serious concern and need to identify the responsible factors for this low availability. Boiler tube failure is identified as a responsible factor for low availability, and economizer is the zone where maximum failure occurred. From the maintenance history sheet, it was identified that economizer is a critical zone where maximum tube failures occur and the main cause of economizer failure is due to high-velocity flue gas particle, i.e., erosion. To increase the availability and minimize the failures, erosion process must be reduced in economizer tubes which is mainly responsible for economizer failure and then CFD analysis has been done for this purpose. This results in a decrease in the shutdown period of the plant and an increase in the system availability as well as the power of the system.

Today energy is directly related with progress or growth of any country and every event requires a huge amount of energy. In today's global competitiveness, demand for energy is very high and India is facing a problem of very poor energy supply. So, researchers and planners are worried about very poor productivity of thermal power plant and the most critical cause for this problem is high capacity waste at these plants. This paper focuses on causes of capacity waste and for this, DMAIC approach is adopted. The study also clears some myths of Six Sigma compatibility at process industries (thermal power plant) for performance improvement. After implementation of the first phase i.e. "Define", the study confirms the competence of Six Sigma in defining the issue of capacity waste.

The present paper is to study and explore the possibility of static instability, Ledinegg flow excursion, in a rectangular supercritical natural circulation loop (RSCNCL). Due to drastic change of thermo-physical properties of fluid near the pseudo-critical point, various static and dynamic instabilities might occur in the loop. The instability may be either Ledinegg excursion or density wave oscillations (DWOs). Many previous researchers have analyzed dynamic instability, DWO, in SCNCL, whereas the Ledinegg excursive instability is not studied in depth. In the present research work, a mathematical model will be implemented to predict the Ledinegg instability in SCNCL. The numerical investigation is successful to find whether there would be any Ledinegg instability in the case of SCNCL or not. KeywordsLedinegg excursive instability • Supercritical water reactor • Rectangular natural circulation loop Nomenclature A Cross sectional area (m 2 ) D Hydraulic diameter (m) f Friction factor G Mass flux density (kg/m 2 ) H Loop height (m) h Specific enthalpy K Loss coefficient L Length of the section (m)

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In present paper, a mathematical model based on the one dimensional nonlinear mass, momentum and energy conservation equations has been developed to study the density wave instability (DWI) in horizontal heater and horizontal cooler supercritical water natural circulation loop (HHHC-SCWNCL). The one dimensional nonlinear mass, momentum and energy conservation equations are discretized by using finite difference method (FDM). The numerical model is validated with the benchmark results (NOLSTA model). Numerical simulations are performed to find the threshold stability zone (TSZ) and draw the stability map for natural circulation loop. Further, effect of change in diameter and riser height on the density wave instability of SCWNCL has been investigated.