POWER February 2020 - 27

CONNECTED PLANT
manufacturing facility? " Brooks said
protecting high-value assets is always at
the forefront of a predictive maintenance
program. " Whatever the initiative is, it's
to support those [assets]. Asset performance
management is where you need
to get started. "
" The power industry is a commodity
industry, " Richmond said. " Whether it's
the local utility or a co-op utility-anybody
can put power on the grid. The reason for
doing so is to make money. If your equipment
is not operating at its full potential,
and if it's suffering from reliability issues,
as a corporation you risk losing money.
By investing in predictive maintenance,
you are ultimately reducing your risks
and therefore saving money. "
Many companies have developed predictive
maintenance programs, and several
of those are participating in POWER's
Connected Plant Conference, set for
Feb. 25-27, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia. The
event focuses on the digital transformation
and digitization for the power generation
and chemical process industries,
including digital monitoring and diagnostics
for power plant operators.
Francois Laborie, president of Cognite
North America, told POWER his
company " established a program for an
aluminum and renewable energy company
in 2020 that will gradually help the
company move from corrective and calendar-based
maintenance to a predictive
maintenance regime. We did so by first
connecting data from different sources
(control systems, work order management
systems, spare parts inventory,
production planning, etc.) and making it
accessible to end-users.
" From there, we developed analytics
tools that monitor alarms, the relative
efficiency of turbines, and key operating
parameters such as the duration of
the subprocesses involved in turbine
start/stop sequences. We used a number
of different tools for the job, including
our own products and third-party
visualization tools. "
Laborie noted the capabilities of his
company's core product, Cognite Data
Fusion, or CDF. " As the analytics tools
continue to run, they will feed more and
more data into Cognite Data Fusion, " he
said. " Using machine learning, the company
will then be able to make predictions
based on equipment performance. "
For example:
■ " The main inlet valve is taking more
time than normal to open. We should
inspect and potentially repair it in
February 2020 | POWER
four weeks. "
■ " Turbine 1 is diverging from its predetermined
optimal performance range.
We should install new labyrinth seals
in eight weeks. "
■ " There have been five alarms related
to lubricating oil pump pressure in the
last quarter. We should perform a live
inspection next week. "
Laborie said current predictive maintenance
applications " are supported by
tailored models and simple GUIs [graphical
user interfaces] to present users with
model output and drill-downs. However,
in the future there is a huge potential for
this to be handled in a unified way in an
application that covers the entire workflow,
from scheduling maintenance to
planning activities, to conducting and
reporting on work done. Before we can
talk about specific software applications,
we need to solve the previous step: that
power generation companies are set up
to power these applications with the
data they are already producing. "
Artificial Intelligence Enters the
Picture
GlobalData in a recent report- " Thematic
Research: Predictive Maintenance in
Power " -listed some of what the group
considers top providers of predictive
maintenance solutions. The list includes
International Business Machines Corp.
(IBM), known for its Maximo Asset Performance
Management system, which is
offered by Projetech.
Richmond said his company's platform
is " integration agnostic. It will integrate
any software product and collect data.
Performance for Veolia, a global company
providing operational, engineering,
and technology solutions for industry,
including power generators. " We've
actually got a couple of IT people, data
scientists, looking at the daily historian
and stuff that we capture on our energy
plants, to give us some idea of predictability
on materials.
" What I've done, in terms of predictive
technology, I used the RCM [reliability
centered maintenance] tool so we can use
predictive technology effectively, " Stock
said. " A lot of this technology is expensive.
It doesn't make it cost-effective to use
something like wireless vibration monitoring.
But the cost is coming down ... I think
the price of a lot of those wireless [monitoring]
systems [will] come down. "
In addition to IBM, other companies
considered among the leaders in predictive
maintenance programs include SAP,
which offers its SAP Predictive Maintenance
and Service solution; Microsoft,
which with its Microsoft Azure provides
a major public cloud platform for the Industrial
Internet of Things (IIoT), including
predictive maintenance; and Agder
Energi, a Norway-based energy group
that " uses Azure Digital Twins to determine
ways to efficiently operate its
electricity grid via distributed energy resources
[DERs], device controls, along
with predictive forecasting to avoid
costly and tedious energy upgrades, "
according to GlobalData.
Elsewhere in Europe, E.ON, the
German-based utility, uses AI to warn
of faults or other issues in the power
grid. Schleswig-Holstein Netz, a German
grid operator, is using the system on its
" By investing in predictive maintenance,
you are ultimately reducing your risks and
therefore saving money. "
-Steve Richmond, founder and CEO of
Projetech Technology Solutions
Projetech products allow the input of
numerous predictive systems to pool
information that can later be analyzed
by humans or AI [artificial intelligence]
to determine a course of action and ultimately
result in more accurate predictive
maintenance. "
" We're actually getting into the
fringes of AI, " said Peter Stock, vice
president-Utility Reliability Technical and
www.powermag.com
medium-voltage grids. Siemens, another
Germany-headquartered company, with
major operations in the U.S. and worldwide,
is notable for its cloud-based operating
system MindSphere, a predictive
learning platform that offers early notification
of asset defects so maintenance
can be performed, minimizing downtime.
SKF USA recently introduced SKF
Pulse (Figure 2), a portable Bluetooth
27
http://www.powermag.com
POWER February 2020

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