Condition based maintenance of gas turbines

Our client manages the maintenance and performance of a fleet of over 15,000 gas turbines.

Its time-based overhaul schedule resulted in a warehouse with more than $2 billion of ex-service components that appeared to be in good condition. Could we re-use these components and optimise the maintenance of the fleet to reduce cost and increase availability?

Gather

We collected sensor data from a small number of turbines, including thermocouples in the hot gas path, speed sensors and derived power

The data needed to be cleaned and repaired prior to application of our bespoke analytics engine

We compared these data with their performance design point for a range of anticipated load cases.

Understand

The analytics on hot gas path temperatures revealed that fewer than 20% of the fleet were within 80% of the most damaging load cases

Creep damage is negligible at temperatures below 80% of the performance design point.

Optimise

For a very small investment, our client could re-use over $1 billion of hot gas path components from its warehouse

There was significant margin to optimise the time based maintenance schedule.