GE’s Monitoring & Diagnostic Center: Turning Fleet Knowledge into Action Saved $70 Million in 2014

ATLANTA

Every day, at its Monitoring & Diagnostics (M&D) Center, GE (NYSE: GE) collects more than 30,000 operating hours of data from a fleet of more than 1,500 gas turbine and generator assets, supplementing a 40-terabyte database representing more than 100 million fleet operating hours. GE announced today that the data-driven insights drawn from this volume of power generation “big data” have translated to customer savings estimated at $70 million in 2014, up from $53. 9 million in 2013.

The Atlanta-based facility features a team of more than 50 engineers that analyze more than 35,000 operational alarms per year. Among the activities monitored at the center are the inlet temperature of a compressor, thermal performance of a gas turbine, temperature of combustion exhaust, dynamic tones of the combustion system, vibration levels of a rotor and the temperature of bearings. On a GE gas turbine unit there are more than 100 physical sensors/300 virtual sensors.

“Our monitoring and diagnostics team and capabilities, play a key role in helping GE customers operate their power plants at high levels of performance and reliability,” said Justin Eggart, general manager, fleet management for GE’s Power Generation Services business. “Our team takes a holistic approach to what we call ‘predictive maintenance,’ which focuses on helping customers sidestep operational barriers before they occur, no matter what type of equipment they are managing.”

The ability to foresee and forestall issues is at the very heart of predictive maintenance. Predictivity solutions for GE’s power generation customers harness massive volumes of data analyzed from one of the world’s largest monitored gas turbine fleet to develop solutions that allow them to make more informed operational and business decisions.

Drawing on the experience of hundreds of thousands of resolved cases, GE’s M&D team has developed dozens of physics-based, proprietary algorithms that provide early warning of more than 150 potential failure mechanisms. This wealth of physical understanding, blended with application of statistical methods, has enabled the team to continually improve the algorithms, thereby increasing the probability of detection while reducing false alarms.

The M&D Center served 502 customer sites in 2014, located in 58 countries, providing assistance more than 8,000 times and helping power plant customers achieve their desired outcomes with reliability and performance 24/7/365.

“We have operational data flowing in continuously from the fleet, and we are in constant contact with our customer sites as well as our broader engineering teams,” added Eggart. “Oftentimes, the collaboration between our engineers and customers leads to the fastest and most complete resolution to the issue at hand, and we appreciate those interaction opportunities that our services enable.”

In addition to GE units, this remote monitoring can be applied across a customer’s entire fleet. Through device-agnostic predictive solutions, the M&D Center monitors technology and equipment not only from GE, but also Nooter/Eriksen, Flowserve, Emerson, Delaval, Byron Jackson and others.

GE also has made substantial improvements in reducing trip rates since the M&D Center opened in 1996. For example, trips per thousand hours for the combined 7F and 9F monitored fleet of gas turbines are down approximately 25 percent since 2009.

Additional regional support with these services is provided to GE customers around the globe from other M&D locations in Scotland, France, India and its newest centers in Dubai, Saudi and China. Using a broad range of analytic tools, these teams diagnose problems ranging from possible failed sensors to gas turbine compressor damage.

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About GE

GE (NYSE: GE) imagines things others don’t, builds things others can’t and delivers outcomes that make the world work better. GE brings together the physical and digital worlds in ways no other company can. In its labs and factories and on the ground with customers, GE is inventing the next industrial era to move, power, build and cure the world. www.ge.com

About GE Power & Water

GE Power & Water provides customers with a broad array of power generation, energy delivery and water process technologies to solve their challenges locally. Power & Water works in all areas of the energy industry including renewable resources such as wind and solar; biogas and alternative fuels; and coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy. The business also develops advanced technologies to help solve the world’s most complex challenges related to water availability and quality. Power & Water’s six business units include Distributed Power, Nuclear Energy, Power Generation Products, Power Generation Services, Renewable Energy and Water & Process Technologies. Headquartered in Schenectady, N.Y., Power & Water is GE’s largest industrial business.

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