Condition Monitoring of Steam Turbines by Performance Analysis

Understanding the infrastructure behind smart maintenance is crucial. It’s not just a technical upgrade — it’s a strategic foundation to build a value-adding business case  for agility, resilience, and continuous improvement.

Mirant Mid-Atlantic’s condition-monitoring team consists of a central group of four technicians and one team leader. The team’s primary responsibilities are the company’s four coal-fired power plants; as resources and priorities permit, the team also provides support to other assets.

Probably 80% of all testing. performed in electrical power systems is related to the verification of insulation quality. This Cadick Corporation Technical Bulletin briefly describes the fundamental concepts of insulation testing including – insulation behavior, types of tests, and some test procedures. For more detailed information, refer to the bibliography at the end of the paper.

When selecting pressure measurement transmitters, the first stage is whether to opt for a transducer or a transmitter. Although the terms are often confused, there are several differences between transducer and transmitter devices. A transducer creates a low-level electronic signal in response to changes in applied or differential pressure. As with transmitters, transducers feature an internal sensor that converts the applied force into an electrical signal, from which the measurement is derived.

For Condition Monitoring (CM) purposes a range of technologies are available, each having its own strengths and weaknesses, and it is usual to consider each of them as a tool in the CM toolkit. The Acoustic Emission (AE) technique has a 40 year history of use for machinery condition monitoring and although it got off to a slow start, in recent years it has gained very widespread acceptance across industry.

Accept that you will sometimes be wrong and do whatever it takes to find out the “as found” condition. This is often difficult to accomplish but it is well worth the effort and in the best circumstances this should be implemented as a normal procedure.

The question I posed is: Are the harmonics real? In other words, although the mass is still only bouncing up and down 30 times per second, is there actually real vibration occurring at 60, 90 and 120 Hz, etc.? OR are these just artifacts of the FFT?