GE Power has announced it has gone live with its Asset Performance Management software with the aim of better forecasting problems at 600 monitored power plants.
The Asset Performance Management (APM) software has been implemented at GE Power’s Monitoring & Diagnostics Center in Atlanta.
The software is to help to better forecast problems with critical equipment at the 600 power plants for which the centre monitors gas turbine and generator assets.
According to Eddie Amos, vice president of industrial applications and GE Digital’s CTO, it’s the ‘first massive use of the software generating data at those volumes.’
As reported by GE, the centre, which serves 500 customers as the world’s largest power plant monitoring facility, receives more than 200 billion data tags daily coming from 1 million sensors attached to 5,000 assets in the 600 power plants it helps to monitor globally.
GE announced that the goal of leveraging GE APM is to extend the amount of time customers receive notice of problems with critical machines from the current minutes or hours, to days or even several weeks.
Another goal is to automate a notification process that is currently conducted by phone or email – with the ultimate end game of reducing power outages for the utilities’ customers.
Amos said: “GE aims to change the paradigm around APM, not just from preventative maintenance, but from something more condition-based, more reliability-based.”
He added: “The platform continues to be strengthened. The verticals that we have a good footprint in are the ones we’re going to focus on.
“Those verticals include everything that is core to GE – naming power, oil and gas, renewable energy, transportation, aviation, and healthcare among them.”
According to GE, engineers at the Monitoring & Diagnostics Center monitor tens of thousands of operational alarms a year, diagnosing problems ranging from failed sensors to gas turbine compressor damage.
GE stated that drawing on the experience of the hundreds of thousands of alarms resolved, the team has developed dozens of physics-based proprietary algorithms that provide early warning of more than 60 different failure mechanisms.
