Despite considerable expansion of power generation capacity in recent years, China still suffers from power shortage. And with fairly low utilisation rates, just below 60%, Chinese power plants have a strong focus on utilisation, availability and reliability.

Manager of Guangdong Yudean Group’s power plant in Meixian, Mr. Jiangjianwen, says that “with the fast developing requirements for an efficient electricity production, the most important thing for our power plants is the availability of the machinery. As condition monitoring could help reduce downtime and increase throughput, we decided to adopt it in 2006”. Read more.  So did the group’s plants in Shajiao and Shaoguan. According to Manager Mr. Hejiankang, Shaoguan, “the objective was to help make the transformation from time based to condition based maintenance”.

Online monitoring quickly proved its value
To help increase plant availability, the group chose Rovsing Dynamics to supply online condition monitoring of

• a steam turbine generator at the 600 MW power plant in Meixian
• a steam turbine generator at the 1200 MW power plant in Shajiao
• a motor, gearbox and other critical machinery on the coal grinding mill of the 850 MW Shaoguan power plant.

An important part of the delivery was training the plants’ staff how to use the system’s predictive data analysis tools and automatic warning messages about developing faults.  Read more >>

 “We got a deeper understanding of the online monitoring system as a useful way to make condition based maintenance come true,” said one of the plants’ maintenance specialists. “After this training we fully believe that by using the system we can get better profit.”

Already three months after the system was installed at Meixian, its automatic fault detection, the AutoDiagnosis™, warned the plant operators about two serious faults: rub between turbine shaft and journal bearing plus rotor misalignment.