Making the team
One key project completed earlier this year was sponsored in 2005 by a team from Meridium and SmartSignal as the companies" "audition" to join UI. The project aimed to develop a predictive maintenance (PM) program for power plants that combines real-time and PM techniques to optimize maintenance activities, thereby reducing O&M costs.
Units 3 and 4 of Xcel Energy's 715-MW, coal-fired Cherokee Station north of downtown Denver (Figure 1) were selected to host the pilot PM project, which ran from mid-September 2005 through February 2006. The pilot project targeted Xcel's Energy Supply business unit, which for several years had used data sources such as MRO Software's Maximo and plant distributed control system historians to help predict equipment failures and improve plant performance. However, the process of integrating the data sets proved to be so complex and time-consuming that their value was not being fully realized.
1. Pilot testing. Cherokee Station near downtown Denver was the site used to determine how well software tools could predict equipment failures and refine maintenance intervals. Courtesy: Xcel Energy
The Meridium-SmartSignal team accepted the challenge of finding a better way to optimize O&M strategies. Meridium's Asset Performance Management System (APMS) integrates information and analysis to identify and mitigate recurring failures by determining the optimal mix of condition-based, time-based, and run-to-failure activities. SmartSignal brought to the table its analytic tools, which identify possible but unpredictable failures. Combining the capabilities of software from three companies—MRO Software, Meridium, and SmartSignal—enabled Xcel Energy to minimize the damage caused by predictable and unpredictable failures alike (Figure 2).
2. Roadmap to success. The Cherokee Station pilot project integrated software tools from Meridium and SmartSignal to optimize plant maintenance strategies. Courtesy: Meridium
The historian data were modeled by SmartSignal for advanced issue recognition and condition-based analysis. The Maximo data were organized and analyzed around equipment descriptions, conditions, locations, and historical work performed using Meridium software. Feeding SmartSignal data into the Meridium software increases the confidence level for prediction accuracy over that of independent analysis while enhancing the accuracy and value of the analysis.
Email
Comments
Print
Reuse
