Abstract
Steam turbogenerators have a wide application in the exploitation of thermal from the combustion of biomass, general waste to energy and natural gas.
In the current social and economic worldwide situation, ensuring the continuity of the industrial process, is a competitive advantage for biomass industries and waste incinerators.
In this context, Fincantieri has developed a cloud-based monitoring system, based on instrumentation installed together with virtual sensors with the aim of detecting deviations from the design, foreseeing the intervention of alarms and trips of the conventional control system. The outcome is the increasing machine availability.
The control system signals are published (via OPC server), processed to generate additional sensors (called ‘virtual sensors’) and distributed to a cloud, overcoming the limited memory capacity.
Thermo-fluodynamic quantities are evaluated to track the machinery aging. Rotor dynamics and bearing are monitored with an operational database to create dedicated monitoring algorithms.
Installation of additional instrumentation is forecasted to allow the updating and the monitoring of all the relevant parameters.
Once the development phase was completed, the system was installed and tested in a first prototype plant. Two powerplants are nowadays already monitored by remote.
