IMPROVING POWER PLANT AVAILABILITY THROUGH EQUIPMENT HEALTHMONITORING

摘要

As reserve generating margins decrease, availability of existing power generation assets must improve. Effective application of condition-based maintenance and risk-informed approaches to maintenance planning requires accurate assessment of the current condition of key plant equipment. On-line monitoring and anomaly detection is now being used by some generating plants, and has been successful in preventing costly unplanned outages. Greater value can be obtained from on-line monitoring if integrated with diagnostics and risk-informed decisions. Several gaps must be addressed to successfully realize this greater value. Among the known gaps are identification of sensor needs, performing failure signature analysis, and addressing the known challenges of wireless sensor networking to achieve cost effective sensor additions. This paper highlights a vision for addressing some of these identified gaps for the power generation industry.