In April 2008 Eletrobrás Termonuclear (Eletronuclear) installed OPENpredictor™ on the steam turbine generator line at their 657 MW nuclear power plant Angra 1 south of Rio de Janeiro - the first nuclear power plant in Brazil and operating since 1982.

Information to ensure safety & reliability
Eletronuclear installed the advanced condition monitoring system because the 20 year old analogue vibration monitoring system had become obsolete. They needed a digital system, which could process huge amounts of real time data and present information in easy to understand graphics – and provide automatic warning and prediction of developing faults. The objective was to 

• Increase the reliability of the steam turbine generator by identifying machinery problems in an early development stage
• Reveal and minimize operational risk at the nuclear plant
• Facilitate planning of corrective actions at the scheduled production stops for safety inspections.  

Read more about the solution in Dynamic News September 2007 >>

Direct value during the implementation phase
Nuclear Power Engineer Márcio Rezende Siniscalchi from Eletronuclear presented their first experience with OPENpredictor™ at a condition monitoring conference in Brazil in November 2008.

“OPENpredictor™ boasts predictive maintenance opportunities, and the predictive maintenance group is already using this system for their analyses,” said Mr. Siniscalch.“ A remote connection allowed Rovsing Dynamics to assist us with diagnostic support from Denmark during the first months of operation and knowledge transfer.”

Already during implementation of OPENpredictor™ valuable conclusions could be made for several machinery problems. The system proved that a perceived machine problem did not exist in reality and thereby saved 1 week of downtime to correct the ‘problem’.

In November 2008 OPENpredictor™ warned about journal bearing rub, a critical problem which would not have been identified by a traditional protection system. Now Eletronuclear’s staff gets such information, which enables them to conduct pro-active maintenance in stead of re-active.

Find out more about Eletronuclear’s experience in Dynamic News March 2009 >>