Optimisation of Generator Maintenance in Modern Power Stations.

In most modern-day power stations, the maintenance for large, base-load power generators is centered around traditional and planned routines. These routines are developed by the original equipment manufacturer upon installation, leaving them prone to becoming outdated, without consideration for more agile technologies. They encourage operators to invest in rigid maintenance schedules regardless of system performance or risk conditioning. Occasionally, these planned routines can even induce costly faults or defects into the system.

Most operators maintain their large generators on a planned schedule resulting in high costs, extended downtime and maintenance induced faults. Although performance can be monitored on a day to day basis, the overall system health is not being reviewed ahead of any planned shutdown. In most cases large amount of digital plant data are at their disposal but are not being used as effectively as possible.

Innovative companies are now seeking a solution that would present them with a view of generator system health based on plant data as opposed to traditional maintenance routines. This would provide station engineers with a detailed view of historic performance and plant performance such that a condition based maintenance strategy could be adopted.

Ada Mode has developed an alternative way to interrogating system condition by utilising the high resolution historic data derived from plant instrumentation, walkdowns and chemical sampling. Data can be extracted from multiple sources, over decades of operations, encompassing a wide range of different operating conditions. A large base-load generator could comprise over 15 sub-systems each with multiple key health parameters. Artificial Intelligence has the ability to process and analyse this large volume of numeric, unstructured and time-series data from disparate silos into one user-friendly interface.

This information can all be presented onto a customised reporting interface which enables engineers to make well informed maintenance decisions based upon an accurate and reliable view of the systems health. In addition interactive reports can make use of our time series exploration technology, which analyses trends and identifies patterns to determine any potential anomalies.

Ada Mode's approach allows plant managers to optimise their maintenance work, significantly reducing costs and keeping the duration of planned shutdowns to a minimum. This has been proven to enable a 30% reduction in generator maintenance.

If you would like to learn more about how artificial intelligence could help your organization, then please reach out to us at Get in touch (ada-mode.com).