AWARE™ - Pulverizer Module

As deregulation climbs to the forefront of the power industry, every aspect of the power generation business is under a commercial and regulatory microscope. Keeping power plants operational is undoubtedly the highest priority for utility management teams, yet keeping the plants operational in a reliable and efficient manner is the biggest challenge for the technical staff. Effective maintenance is at the heart of achieving reliable and efficient operation.

For coal-fired units, pulverizers have a major impact on capacity factor and efficiency. The ability to track, trend, and report pulverizer conditions has proven cost effective in increasing availability while maintaining safe, reliable and efficient operation. In addition, utilities can now extend the duration between overhauls safely because they have accurate history and data analysis to support these recommendations. AWARE has been successful in helping utilities do just that.

What AWARE Can Do For You?

With Long Term Service Agreements (LTSA) becoming increasingly popular for maintaining pulverizers, there is an increased need to facilitate collaboration between OEMs or service providers and the utility personnel. Aware ™ is a web-based application that can be used to manage the pulverizer maintenance program and capture and share the history and knowledge of the equipment among multiple groups. It enables all users to document, trend and report on all aspects of pulverizer maintenance, and makes it available to all members of the team who are collaborating – the service providers, OEMs, as well as utility personnel.

AWARE is used to r eport, track, and trend the following type of information:

• Coal fineness tests
• Wear part replacements – actual and scheduled
• Clearance measurements
• Coal flow & composition
• Inspection findings/ recommendations/ status

Documenting current activities, reviewing past history and finding other relevant information associated with the equipment being worked on is all available on the same screen, making it easy to locate.

The software guides the user through documenting inspections and tests by presenting forms to be filled in. A unique form is available for each type of equipment being worked on. The user has specific fields to fill in to document each activity, such as "Conditions Found", "Recommendations", "Priority", etc. This enables you to have a standardized approach to reporting inspection findings. Standardization insures that the right information is collected for each activity, and makes it much easier to review later.

AWARE allows you to include any type of data to document your assessment activities; including number, text, graphics, digital images, audio, video, and any form of multimedia supported in the industry today. AWARE supports many image formats such as BMP, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIF, Microsoft Picture, Windows Metafile (WMF), GIF, etc., for direct input into an assessment record. AWARE is also compatible with MS Office products, enabling users to attach documents, spreadsheets, etc. directly to an inspection record for inclusion in the inspection report.

Pulverizer inspections are routinely done to identify problems, which then require engineers to recommend short and long term solutions to those problems. With every hour being critical, personnel need to insure that recommended solutions are tracked, prioritized, reviewed, approved, planned, and assigned to the appropriate department quickly and accurately.

After filling in the appropriate forms to document the inspection or test, AWARE can be used to generate reports in both hard copy and PDF format. Typical reports include:

• Daily work list reports providing a detailed list of recommendations.
• Periodic reports of the conditions found/ recommendations to give craft personnel a better understanding of the work required.
• Mill fineness reports.
• Wear part replacement reports.
• At the end of the outage, a consolidated inspection report is automatically generated including photographs, conditions, recommendations, tables, etc. The report can be for the entire unit (other equipment modules can be purchased separately), just the pulverizers, or each individual component (e.g. gear case, bowl, etc.).

 
Manage Outage Information
The AWARE suite of software enables personnel to manage the sharing of knowledge. The inspector records conditions found, recommendations, and priorities for each component as they are inspected or as the tests are done. At the end of each day, a plant engineer reviews the recommendations flagged as needing immediate attention. If he concurs with the recommendation, it is then flagged for the planner. The planner logs onto the AWARE application to see a consolidated list of recommendations by component, priority, and date. He then schedules the work, and utilizing the CMMS system, assigns the work to new or existing work orders. AWARE facilitates this collaboration among the parties, whether they are in the same location or thousands of miles away, and tracks the status of each item recommended.