Experience With Advanced Monitoring Tools

The current economic situation in the global energy market demands a cost reduction in maintenance concurrently with high availability and reliability of critical plant components. A combination of state-of-the-art on-line monitoring and diagnostic systems with the necessary off-line inspections allows more reliable operation with extended durations between maintenance intervals by applying modern data mining and expert systems. Prerequisites for such a condition based maintenance strategy are the incorporation of all available information of the generator (i.e., design knowledge, fleet experience, history of the machine) and all diagnosis and monitoring information. The experience with a modular monitoring system covering the main elements of a generator will be demonstrated.