Detecting and diagnosing faults in plant critical equipment is essential. Early detection can provide significant benefits including the avoidance of unscheduled outages and possible equipment damage. A monitoring and diagnostic system is a vital tool used to achieve this. It can be used on site or at remote locations. Key problems are: 1. Availability of staff for monitoring 2. Filtering large quantities of data for significant events 3. Identifying details of faults that require repair 4. Installation and maintenance of remote diagnostic systems 5. IT security issues that can limit system deployment 6. Informing staff of faults and enabling fault analysis using the latest mobile technology. A remote monitoring and diagnostic system (TIGER) enables staff to identify turbine problems remotely, without the need to visit the customer site. Monitoring and diagnostics is available to plant and support staff via a remote client or a browser based web version of the system. These get data from a web server running in Glasgow, Scotland. The web based remote monitoring and diagnostics system will also run on an I-Phone or I- Pad or an Android phone, in a standard WEB browser. Out of hours support can be facilitated by the transmission of diagnostics via text messages to the cell phones of plant and support staff, and automatically generated diagnostic reports via email. Two case studies describe problems that occurred on two separate GE Frame 6 gas turbine COGEN installations. In one case the plant engineers were located two miles from the site diagnostic system data server. However, they were able to use the web based remote monitoring and diagnostics system to identify problems with the turbine. In both cases, support company engineers were also able to analyse these problems in more detail at their office location in Glasgow Scotland, and feed this information back to staff on site, in a rapid and timely manner, avoiding any need for support staff to be sent to the customer site.
展开▼
