Having the best monitoring system to effectively monitor irregular gas turbine conditions, alert appropriate personnel, and empower them to respond appropriately can save a significant amount of time and money. In this section, we will be discussing more on how a gas turbine monitoring system helps to improve gas turbine efficiency and safety.
Introduction
Continuous remote monitoring and historical trending for virtually infinite operational parameters enable a major turbine OEM to develop suggestions that help their gas and steam turbine clients make informed business maintenance and repair decisions. For gas turbines, ensuring improved equipment availability, performance, and lifetime ownership cost requires consistent quality of planned and predictive maintenance throughout time.
What is a Gas Turbine?
Gas turbines are a well-established technology with capacities ranging from 1 megawatt to hundreds of megawatts. Gas turbines generate high-quality heat for district heating, steam generation, absorption cooling, and industrial applications. Alternatively, this high-temperature heat can be recovered and used to generate hot water or steam within the gas turbine to improve its power generation efficiency. Steam can be generated at high pressure and superheated before being used to drive a steam turbine, in a combined-cycle plant,. Dry combustion techniques, water or steam injection, or exhaust treatment can all be used to reduce gas turbine emissions to extremely low levels. Maintenance expenses are typically a third to half of the reciprocating engine generators per unit of power generation.
Gas turbines are frequently the preferred choice for many big commercial or industrial CHP installations greater than 1 MW due to their low maintenance and high-quality waste heat. Turbines have the lowest capital and maintenance costs of any CHP prime mover for bigger CHP systems; and they also have the lowest capital and maintenance costs of any CHP prime mover.
Responsive and Proactive Monitoring
Through a 24-hour Remote Monitoring Center (RMC) in Orlando, FL, Mitsubishi Power Systems provides real-time monitoring and improved prediction of potential problems. Every one to three seconds, all data points from each unit are sent into the RMC. This is kept for at least two years for historical reference; making this system an extremely dynamic troubleshooting tool. For each gas turbine arrangement, 1,000 to 3,000 data points are monitored, including all auxiliary system information. The conventional gas turbine unit parameters that are monitored are listed below:
- Environmental Factors
- Conditions of a Hot Gas Path
- Dynamics of Combustor (CPFM)
- Features of the Control System
- Indicators of Vibration
- Signals of valve demand, position, and feedback
- Parameters of the Auxiliary System
- Set Points and Alarm Indications
Mitsubishi receives a continuous data stream of thousands of points of data per second in real-time. All of this information is sent to their OSISoft PI System to employ Exile TopView Alarm Management Software to aggregate alarms from all of the monitored installations across the world. The RMC receives auditory, visual, and even email alert message notifications through Exele TopView. Any unexpected deviations trigger an instant response from the RMC personnel.
Alarm Notification and Management
RMC looked for an alarm management solution that could meet their demands around a year ago. The manufacturer no longer maintained the alarm management product that we had been using for years. In addition, as the number of monitoring points grew, it outgrew the package. This began to run into more and more problems. Software for Alarm Management and Notification from Exele TopView was selected. There were numerous advantages to using TopView. It’s incredibly adaptable, with a variety of notification choices and excellent customer service. Exele
TopView connects directly to the OSIsoft PI syste. It presently monitors 30,000 alarm tags as well as a large number of data tags. Due to a large number of potential alarms, the RMC staff had to cope with redundant or repetitive alarms. These are circumstances where an alarm condition has been identified and action is being taken; or if the alarm is being caused by a malfunctioning sensor.
Gas Turbine Control System
The Gas Turbine Control System monitors and protects you from hazardous circumstances. Companies like GE and Woodward produce turbine control systems for power plants. GE products include IS220PDIOH1A, IS200HSLAH2A, IS220UCSAH1A etc. The control software package is used to create, configure, trend, and analyze diagnostics on Mark VIe controllers and related systems.
Summary
Having the monitoring system to effectively monitor irregular gas turbine conditions; notifying the appropriate personnel, and empowering them to respond accordingly, can save a tremendous amount of time and money. Exile TopView’s breadth of features and ease of use provides a powerful and versatile solution that has been proven successful across many industries; including multiple remote monitoring centers.
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