pwr_february-2025 - 17

POWER INTERVIEW
POWER: What are some of the specific
components/equipment that can be
used to enhance reliability?
Nyenhuis: We have found the best
way to enhance reliability is to look
back and wade through available data
to understand, to the degree possible,
what items show up as key negative
contributors to a plant's overall reliability
metrics.
Do particular trends show up? What
2. A proactive reliability management
strategy is the secret against declining
operational performance while improving
process availability and lowering operating
costs. Courtesy: Emerson
goals of a process. As an industry we
have tended to design processes and
equipment around static, fixed type
assumptions, but we see this changing
as the power generation world gets
more sophisticated and dynamic. Technology
allows us to more accurately
model potential risks with historical
data and design assumptions. These
tools provide quantitative ways to balance
the goals of process availability
against the costs associated with various
levels of redundancy.
POWER: How can operations be standardized
to improve reliability?
Nyenhuis: One of the things that we
are seeing is our customers leveraging
additional levels of automation implementation
within their existing technology
to encapsulate operational expertise
directly within the base level automation
infrastructure before the existing
expertise leaves the industry. This process
forces customers to pull the right
cross-functional team together, those
who know the specific characteristics
of the plant they operate and maintain.
This leads to embedding the best practice
operational procedures in sequence
automation that can be leveraged over
and over, driving consistency and repeatability.
Tracking the appropriate metrics
over time, such as startup times or fuel
consumption, as well as operator interactions
with the distributed control system,
shows that operational consistency
is enhanced and, over a longer time horizon,
reductions in overall lost megawatt-hours
have been achieved, directly
improving reliability goals.
February 2025 | POWER
Nyenhuis: We have seen a significant
increase in our customers deploying
model predictive control in appropriate
areas of the process such as steam temperature
control, drum level control, load,
and emissions control, as well as other
critical process areas. The impact we are
seeing to enhance reliability is model
predictive control's ability to better manage
critical off design situations.
When the control can be predictive
in nature, we have seen it have a better
ability to coordinate multiple control responses,
ideally returning a process to a
stable state after a critical upset, even if
it is at a degraded output. For example,
we have seen model predictive drum level
controls better manage upsets to dynamic
steam transition issues related to
a combined cycle bypass system. When
we have the predictive ability to steer the
process through the upset, we increase
the ability to avoid unit trips, which increases
overall process reliability.
POWER: How can a program be implemented
to enable proactive replacewww.powermag.com
types
of events have led to the most
lost production over the past number
of years? Depending on the answers to
these types of questions, different approaches
may be called for.
Can a particular system or set of systems
at a plant be identified as a key contributor?
If so, aligning specific available
technologies to manage the risk these
systems pose may be warranted.
If human performance factors are a
large contributor to lost generation, review
of automation system performance
and alarm management implementation
may make sense. There is an abundance
of useful technologies out in the market
today: the challenge is aligning these
technologies with stated risk mitigation
objectives in as an efficient and cost-effective
way as possible.
POWER: How can model predictive
control be used to enhance reliability?
ment and/restoration of older equipment
(both software and hardware) in power
plant and power grid systems?
Nyenhuis: This effort connects to
a question posed earlier and centers
around what is known about the effective
lifecycle stage of critical assets and
systems coupled with an understanding
of current symptoms that can be observed.
We liken this to trying to understand
whether an aging asset is like a
fit 82-year-old with no indication of cholesterol
issues, normal blood pressure,
and a clean medical history, or is it an
overweight 74-year-old with a history of
medical issues such as hypertension,
diabetes, and high cholesterol.
We have the ability, with technology
today, to accurately track the " age " of
critical assets and perform both periodic
and continuous tests to monitor health
symptoms and stress levels.
Implementing
these technologies and aggregating
them into easy-to-understand
outputs helps us understand where the
" doctor " needs to focus.
As previously discussed, reviewing
historical data and what may be currently
available to understand existing
" symptoms " helps set the stage
for where to initially focus efforts. We
want to ensure there is a clear picture
of asset criticality across the plant.
Understanding a picture of historical
impacts to unit reliability and ensuring
this analysis lines up with asset criticality
lens sets the stage for how to
move forward.
Ideally, we want to deploy a proactive
reliability management strategy that
centers around actively monitoring the
risk of aging assets while improving process
availability and lowering operating
costs. We especially want to identify any
critical assets that require immediate
attention. For ongoing monitoring, we
want to leverage existing failure mode
and effects analysis (FMEA), reliability
strategies, work procedure development,
and computerized maintenance
management software (CMMS) integration
to help focus initially on proper
risk management of any identified highcriticality
assets that may show signs
of excessive age or poor health. These
efforts allow us to target an asset management
program and associated technologies
that directly impact known
reliability risks and lay a foundation that
supports future expansion. ■
-Darrell Proctor is a senior editor
for POWER.
17
http://www.powermag.com
pwr_february-2025

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