Friday 29 Mar 2024
By
main news image

This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 9, 2018 - July 15, 2018

UNPLANNED downtime is costly for business, even more so if you are in the electricity generation industry. Having invested millions in a gas turbine, the last thing that a power plant operator wants to see is an unplanned downtime event.

According to General Electric Co (GE), a customer may suffer about US$2 million in lost revenue in a 15-day forced outage event without monitoring and diagnostics (M&D).

In comparison, the customer may only see some US$130,000 in lost revenue in an actual two-day planned outage event with M&D.

In GE’s M&D centre in Atlanta, the US, a team of more than 50 engineers analyses more than 60,000 operational alarms each year, assisting customers in enhancing their asset reliability and performance 24/7, 365 days a year.

But the Atlanta team is not alone. It has counterparts in China, India, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, France and Switzerland. Globally, GE monitors 2,000 gas and steam turbines in 69 countries and more than 800 power plants around the world.

Closer to home, GE in December 2016 launched a remote M&D centre in Kuala Lumpur. The Power Services division’s first-of-its-kind facility in Asia-Pacific was set up to strengthen its existing global networks.

While significantly smaller than the Atlanta centre, the M&D centre in KL is able to provide services to over 60 customers and 75 plants, including more than 200 gas and steam turbines, boilers and generators across 10 countries within Asia-Pacific.

Christopher J Held, senior director and engineering manager of M&D for GE’s Power Services division, highlights that the set-up of the M&D centre in KL is a perfect complement to the Atlanta centre, with half a globe and 12-hour time difference separating them.

“They (M&D engineers in KL) are in the office when we are not in our office. It is exactly 12 hours’ difference. With that, we can give a timelier response to all our customers, regardless of where they are located,” he tells The Edge at the M&D centre in Atlanta.

Held leads the teams for remote monitoring and support of 1,000 power plants, providing proactive diagnostic recommendations to improve operability and reliability of the fleet.

“If we look at the time zone, the team in KL will be working from 9am to 5pm (Malaysia time). The issue could happen anytime [in Asia-Pacific countries], we do not want our customers to wait. We have to get the right expert at that time to help them urgently,” he explains.

For instance, the M&D centre in Atlanta is currently monitoring nine power plants in Malaysia, all of which use GE’s gas turbines.

“Likewise, if something happens in the US at 4am, I don’t have to wake any of them (in Atlanta) up. Instead, I’m going to call my colleagues in the KL office to help our customers here,” Held elaborates.

Using its predictive solutions, GE’s customers will benefit from real-time data collection, enabling efficient problem-solving guidance and the avoidance of false alarms. These enhanced capabilities could help reduce maintenance costs by up to 30%.

Held acknowledges that the M&D centre in KL does not necessarily make the reaction time faster, but it does allow GE to collaborate better with its customers in Malaysia and other Asia-Pacific countries.

“The way our system works is that when an issue comes up in KL, these guys in Atlanta will be notified right away. And then, they are going to work on that. But if they need to do a follow-up with the customer afterwards, they will have to go to the team in KL,” he says.

Every day, GE collects more than 50,000 operating hours of data from more than 2,500 globally deployed power generation assets, supplementing a 120-terabyte database that represents more than 200 million fleet operating hours.

Using a combination of off-the-shelf and custom analytic tools, the M&D team diagnoses problems ranging from failed sensors to gas turbine compressor damage. Drawing on the experience of hundreds of thousands of alarms resolved, the team has developed hundreds of physics-based proprietary algorithms that provide early warnings of more than 250 failure mechanisms.

Indeed, this expertise generated savings of more than US$300 million for its customers last year.

 

 

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's AppStore and Androids' Google Play.

      Print
      Text Size
      Share