Abstracts - VGB PowerTech Journal 7/2012

Interface management of turbo set maintenance in RWE Power AG

Andreas Hinterthan, Bruno Schroeder and Sebastian Buchwald

The current fundamental changes taking place in the energy market demonstrate the necessity for operators to unceasingly inspect and develop their component-specific maintenance strategies, with the objective of ensuring that their maintenance programme meets requirements and delivers value for money at any time. As early as the liberalisation of the power markets in the mid-1990s, the hard coal/gas division of RWE Power began to compile options for the development and optimisation of maintenance strategies. The interfaces between partial components of turbo groups, management of these interfaces, and resultant gains in terms of component know-how are presented.

Integrated concept of outage planning and implementation

Björn Sude

Changing demands in the energy market have influenced Fortum to continuously improve their processes for their outage management at the Trianel Gas- und Dampfturbinenkraftwerk Hamm. Condition reports and long-term investment plans as well as preventive maintenance tasks and findings from further inspections are taken into consideration in the preparation of an outage. The tasks are chosen from different pools and processed in the work order management phase. The results of the inspections or work carried out are used as feedback to plan required work in the future.

The new VGB-Standard: performance indicators and checklists for structuring and improving maintenance processes

Burkhard Cramer and Michael Lux

Following discussions on new strategies, the VGB Technical Committee “Maintenance Management” entrusted a working group to deal with the issue of “practical parameters for processes in maintenance”. The working group developed parameters that are rather supporting technical maintenance personnel when executing maintenance jobs than monitoring and measuring finance. Further optimisation is provided by checklists for the structured execution of maintenance jobs.

Damage to drive train of wind turbine

Thomas Griggel and Thomas Gellermann

The use of wind energy for power generation leads to technical problems and challenges. The Allianz Risk Consulting GmbH (Allianz Center for Technology, AZT) has been investigating damage on wind turbines since 1993. The investigation work on damages of the drive train of wind turbines is focusing on main bearing and gearbox. In this article results of the investigation of the AZT work on drive trains of wind turbines are presented. The results of the root cause analysis carried out lead to the major damage aspects of drive train of wind turbines.

Technology for the largest offshore wind turbine in the world

Markus Rieck

Offshore generation of electricity by wind power is expanding strongly in northern Europe and is expected to develop significantly in North America and Asia. In response to a call for tenders, launched by the French Government in July 2011, that aims to install 3,000 MW of wind turbine power off the French shores by 2015, Alstom has developed the 6 MW Haliade™ 150-6MW wind turbine. The largest offshore wind turbine in the world was inaugurated in spring 2012 in Le Carnet, France. The wind turbine underwent a series of year-long tests on land at the Le Carnet site, before a second turbine is placed in the sea off the Belgian coast in autumn 2012. Pre-series production is planned for 2013 with production in series due to start in 2014.

Customer-oriented service as a value contributor for wind turbine operators

Uli Schulze Südhoff

Recently, the European onshore wind market has seen slower growth, also due to uncertainty in tariff policies and European financing conditions. European wind turbine operators are looking for new avenues to extract more value from their assets. As a result, wind turbine manufacturers need to refocus and find ways to enhance customer value along the entire value chain. In particular, manufacturers need to challenge their current operations and maintenance (O&M) business model, think more holistically about service, and move from reactive maintenance towards a proactive strategy with an “asset-management” mindset.

Rehabilitation of the Ataka power plant, boilers 1 + 2

Martin Pogoreutz, Theo Bauer and Mahmoud Balbaa

The paper describes the method for rehabilitation of the two oil-and gas-fired boilers 1 and 3 of the Ataka power plant located in Suez/Egypt. The two 150 MW units, commissioned in the 1980ies, had to be repaired, due to decreasing output and availability. The goal of all rehabilitation measures was to bring both units back to their nominal load under safe and reliable operating conditions. Special marginal conditions for the implementation as well as single measures are outlined.

Mobile balancing reducing vibrations in energy and power plants

Edwin Becker

Rotating components in enery and power plants are complex and vibratory systems. In order to extend the lifetime of power plant components, housing as well as shaft vibrations should be reduced to a minimum. Unbalances of horizontal and vertical rotors unnecessarily increase the vibration level and induce natural frequencies which may cause dangerous resonances. In case of newly-mounted and/or modified rotors, the balancing quality shall therefore be metrologically monitored in general and enhanced, if required. Mobile balancing with either VIBXPERT or SmartBalancer is deemed to be an efficient procedure to reduce any resonance excitation proactively.

Innovative methods for maintenance and monitoring of transport preservation of turbo generators

Sascha Rodriguez, Rainer Pfohl, Hossein Safari, Roland Dubois and Stephan Wittner

Today, power plant components are manufactured nearly all over the world. Size and weight of many components and also the complexity and length of the transport routes require highly sophisticated logistics based on various means of transport by sea and by land. Critical points during transport include continuous maintenance, monitoring and documentation of the preservation measures set in the factory to withstand the exposure of the components to different and partially adverse ambient conditions. An overview of innovative systems for maintaining and monitoring for example of a 1,300 MVA generator stator.

SABS - deployment in fossil-fuelled utility steam generators

Sven Lohmann, Axel Pauly and Thomas Furth

The Shield for Accelerated Boiler Service (SABS®) is a newly developed safety equipment, which creates a protected area of work to be formed in the most diverse locations inside a power plant. During outage periods, the area beneath the safety shield is protected from falling objects such as slugging, material or tools. The SABS® consists of a flexible, stretchable special canvas. It covers the entire cross-section of the area of work and protects the working space underneath.

Increased wind farm reliability by monitoring of the electrical assets

Maik Koch

Condition monitoring of wind turbine generators (CMS) means in its common usage the monitoring of vibrations coming from gearbox and drive chain; thus of mechanical measures. However, electrical components belong to the chain of energy production, too. These are generators, transformers, cables, and finally the substation feeding in the generated power to the electrical grid. Particularly the substation is a bottleneck, where the transformer and the cables have the highest relative failure frequencies. This article aims to give an overview on diagnostic methods, applied on-site and on-line, for monitoring of transformers and cables.

High-efficiency filtration in dry/semi-dry FGD plants

Florin Popovici

Dry/semi-dry FGD plants are associated, in general, with a fabric filter plant. The paper highlights the importance of specific fibre properties like cross section and titre associated with the filtration requirements and the filter material chemical resistance for dry/semi-dry FGD process conditions in coal-fired boiler bag houses. References related to dry/semi-dry FGD plants applied to coal-fired boilers around the world are presented and include the performance evaluation of these plants, the type of filter media, plant design specifications, process parameters and particulate emission efficiency.

Troubleshooting at reverse osmosis performance decrease

Jan J.J. Soons

There are several causes for decreasing RO (reverse osmosis) membrane performance, each of which requiring different actions to deal with the possible cause. Two of the main factors affecting the performance of the system are feedwater quality (pre-treatment can be applied to remove fouling agents from the influent, for example to reduce scaling and for the protection of membranes) and operational conditions (recovery rate, cleaning frequencies etc). When fouling occurs, the TMP increases, the cleaning rate will increase, the quality of the effluent will decrease and the lifetime of the membranes will become shorter. In this paper, four main types of fouling will be discussed along with the effects of several operational conditions. The results of a study of a full-scale RO system from a demin plant are presented. It is shown that not only biofouling but also scaling processes play an important role.