Optimizing Maintenance for Multi-Unit Industrial Gas Turbine Installations

Author(s):  
Markus Bohlin ◽  
Mathias Wa¨rja

High levels of availability and reliability are essential in many industries where production is subject to high costs due to downtime. Examples where gas turbines are used include the mechanical drive in natural gas pipelines and power generation on oil platforms, where it is common to use redundant gas turbines to mitigate the effects of service outage. In this paper, component-level maintenance of parallel multi-unit systems is considered, allowing production at a reduced level when some of the units are not operational. Units are themselves assumed to be composed out of components in a serial configuration; maintenance of one component implies shutdown of the unit. Parallel installations allow maintenance to be performed on one or a few gas turbines without taking down the entire installation. This allows maintenance to be optimized even further than in a serial system. However, the maintenance optimization process is made more complicated, since there now exist both positive and negative grouping effects. The positive grouping effects come from shared setup activities and costs, and the negative effects come from resource limitations, in this case the limited number of gas turbines which can be maintained at the same time. In the approach presented in this paper, each component has its individual preventive maintenance schedule, which is updated at inspections, changes in production and when indicated using remote condition monitoring. A minimal repair model for noncritical routine inspections and service tasks is assumed, which does not affect component state. In addition, previously developed procedures for estimating and measuring residual component lifetime for individual components during operation are used. The procedures are based on a Retirement For Cause (RFC) approach where components are not replaced until a potential failure has been detected. To maximize revenues for an operator, the available information is evaluated using software where scenario analysis and optimization is performed. To show the possible economic effects, gas turbine operation data is used together with maintenance and operator requirements as input for optimization of a production line consisting of a natural-gas compressor station having three SGT-600 gas turbines. Savings can be substantial compared to a traditional preventive maintenance plan.

Author(s):  
Markus Bohlin ◽  
Mathias Wa¨rja ◽  
Anders Holst ◽  
Pontus Slottner ◽  
Kivanc Doganay

In oil and gas applications, the careful planning and execution of preventive maintenance is important due to the high costs associated with shutdown of critical equipment. Optimization and lifetime management for equipment such as gas turbines is therefore crucial in order to achieve high availability and reliability. In this paper, a novel condition-based gas turbine maintenance strategy is described and evaluated. Using custom-made gas turbine maintenance planning software, maintenance is repeatedly reoptimized to fit into the time intervals where production losses are least costly and result in the lowest possible impact. The strategy focuses on accurate online lifetime estimates for gas turbine components, where algorithms predicting future maintenance requirements are used to produce maintenance deadlines. This ensures that the gas turbines are maintained in accordance with the conditions on site. To show the feasibility and economic effects of a customer-adapted maintenance planning process, the maintenance plan for a gas turbine used in a real-world scenario is optimized using a combinatorial optimization algorithm and input from gas turbine operation data, maintenance schedules and operator requirements. The approach was validated through the inspection of a reference gas turbine after a predetermined time interval. It is shown that savings may be substantial compared to a traditional preventive maintenance plan. In the evaluation, typical cost reductions range from 25 to 65%. The calculated availability increase in practice is estimated to range from 0.5 to 1%. In addition, downtime reductions of approximately 12% are expected, due solely to improved planning. This indicates significant improvements.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (suppl. 2) ◽  
pp. 343-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milana Gutesa ◽  
Branka Gvozdenac-Urosevic ◽  
Vojin Grkovic

This paper presents the performance and economic analysis of the gas turbine with co-firing gas from corn cob gasification and natural gas. Adiabatic and non-adiabatic expansion in the turbine is considered. The analysis is performed parametrically with corn cob gasification gas and natural gas ratio. The volumetric energy content of fuels with different share of gas from the corn cob gasification therefore, with different calorific values, is compared by means of the Wobbe Index. In energy and economic analyses, the following configurations are dealt with: single manifold, dual manifold and separate gas systems.


Author(s):  
Elliot Sullivan-Lewis ◽  
Vincent McDonell

Lean-premixed gas turbines are now common devices for low emissions stationary power generation. By creating a homogeneous mixture of fuel and air upstream of the combustion chamber, temperature variations are reduced within the combustor, which reduces emissions of nitrogen oxides. However, by premixing fuel and air, a potentially flammable mixture is established in a part of the engine not designed to contain a flame. If the flame propagates upstream from the combustor (flashback), significant engine damage can result. While significant effort has been put into developing flashback resistant combustors, these combustors are only capable of preventing flashback during steady operation of the engine. Transient events (e.g., auto-ignition within the premixer and pressure spikes during ignition) can trigger flashback that cannot be prevented with even the best combustor design. In these cases, preventing engine damage requires designing premixers that will not allow a flame to be sustained. Experimental studies were conducted to determine under what conditions premixed flames of hydrogen and natural gas can be anchored in a simulated gas turbine premixer. Tests have been conducted at pressures up to 9 atm, temperatures up to 750 K, and freestream velocities between 20 and 100 m/s. Flames were anchored in the wakes of features typical of premixer passageways, including cylinders, steps, and airfoils. The results of this study have been used to develop an engineering tool that predicts under what conditions a flame will anchor, and can be used for development of flame anchoring resistant gas turbine premixers.


2011 ◽  
Vol 133 (04) ◽  
pp. 52-52
Author(s):  
Rainer Kurz

This article discusses the importance of gas turbines, centrifugal compressors and pumps, and other turbomachines in processes that bring natural gas to the end users. To be useful, the natural gas coming from a large number of small wells has to be gathered. This process requires compression of the gas in several stages, before it is processed in a gas plant, where contaminants and heavier hydrocarbons are stripped from the gas. From the gas plant, the gas is recompressed and fed into a pipeline. In all these compression processes, centrifugal gas compressors driven by industrial gas turbines or electric motors play an important role. Turbomachines are used in a variety of applications for the production of oil and associated gas. For example, gas turbine generator sets often provide electrical power for offshore platforms or remote oil and gas fields. Offshore platforms have a large electrical demand, often requiring multiple large gas turbine generator sets. Similarly, centrifugal gas compressors, driven by gas turbines or by electric motors are the benchmark products to pump gas through pipelines, anywhere in the world.


Author(s):  
Dengji Zhou ◽  
Huisheng Zhang ◽  
Yi-Guang Li ◽  
Shilie Weng

The availability requirement of natural gas compressors is high. Thus, current maintenance architecture, combined periodical maintenance and simple condition based maintenance, should be improved. In this paper, a new maintenance method, dynamic reliability-centered maintenance (DRCM), is proposed for equipment management. It aims at expanding the application of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) in maintenance schedule making to preventive maintenance decision-making online and seems suitable for maintenance of natural gas compressor stations. A decision diagram and a maintenance model are developed for DRCM. Then, three application cases of DRCM for actual natural gas compressor stations are shown to validate this new method.


Author(s):  
SS Talebi ◽  
AM Tousi ◽  
A Madadi ◽  
M Kiaee

Recently, the utilization of micro gas turbines in smart grids are rising that makes the part-load operation principal situation of the engine service. This leads to faster life consumption that increases the importance of the diagnostics process. Gas path analysis is an effective method for gas turbine diagnostics. Complex dynamics of gas turbine induces challenging conditions to perform applicable gas path analysis. This study aims to facilitate MGT gas path diagnostics through reducing the number of monitoring parameters and preparation a pattern for engine level and component level health assessment in both full and part load operation of a recuperated micro gas turbine. To attain this goal a model is proposed to simulate MGT off-design performance which is validated against experimental data in healthy and degraded operation modes. Fouling in compressor, turbine and recuperator and erosion in compressor and turbine as the most common degradations in the gas turbine are considered. The fault simulation is performed by changing the health parameters of gas path components. According to the result investigation, a matrix comprises deviation contours of four parameters, Power, fuel flow, compressor discharge pressure, and exhaust gas temperature is presented and analyzed. The analysis shows that monitoring these parameters makes it possible to perform engine level and component level diagnostics through evaluating a binary code (generated by mentioned parameter variations) against the fault effects pattern in different load fractions and fault severities. The simulation also showed that the most power drop occurred under the compressor fouling by about 8.7% while the most reduction in thermal efficiency is observed under recuperator fouling by about 7.84%. Furthermore, the investigation showed the maximum decrease in the surge margin induced by the compressor fouling during the lower part-load operation by about 45.7% while in the higher loads created by the turbine fouling by about 14%.


Author(s):  
V. G. McDonell ◽  
M. W. Effinger ◽  
J. L. Mauzey

The deployment of small gas turbines at landfills and wastewater treatment plants is attractive due to the availability of waste fuel gases generated at these sites and the need for onsite power and/or heat. The fuel gases produced by these applications typically contain 35 to 75% of the heating value of natural gas and contain methane (CH4) diluted primarily with carbon dioxide (CO2) and sometimes nitrogen (N2). Demonstrations of 30 to 250 kW gas turbines operating on these waste fuels are underway, but little detailed information on the systematic effect of the gas composition on performance is available. Growth in the use of small gas turbines for these applications will likely require that they meet increasingly stringent emission regulations, creating a need to better understand and to further optimize emissions performance for these gases. The current study characterizes a modified commercial natural gas fired 60 kW gas turbine operated on simluated gases of specified composition and establishes a quantitative relationship between fuel composition, engine load, and emissions performance. The results can be used to determine the expected impact of gas composition on emissions performance.


2015 ◽  
Vol 656-657 ◽  
pp. 113-118
Author(s):  
Hsiu Mei Chiu ◽  
Po Chuang Chen ◽  
Yau Pin Chyou ◽  
Ting Wang

The effect of synthetic natural gas (SNG) and mixture of syngas and SNG fed to Natural Gas Combined-Cycle (NGCC) plants is presented in this study via a system-level simulation model. The commercial chemical process simulator, Pro/II®V8.1.1, was used in the study to build the analysis model. The NGCC plant consists of gas turbine (GT), heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) and steam turbine (ST). The study envisages two analyses as the basic and feasibility cases. The former is the benchmark case which is verified by the reference data with the GE 7FB gas turbine. According to vendor’s specification, the typical net plant efficiency of GE 7FB NGCC with two gas turbines to one steam turbine is 57.5% (LHV), and the efficiency is the benchmark in the simulation model built in the study. The latter introduces a feasibility study with actual parameters in Taiwan. The SNG-fed GE 7FB based combined-cycle is evaluated, and the mixture of SNG and syngas is also evaluated to compare the difference of overall performance between the two cases. The maximum ratio of syngas to SNG is 0.14 due to the constraint for keeping the composition of methane at a value of 80 mol%, to meet the minimum requirement of NG in Taiwan. The results show that the efficiency in either case of SNG or mixture of SNG and syngas is slightly lower than the counterpart in the benchmark one. Because the price of natural gas is much higher than that of coal, it results in higher idle capacity of NGCC. The advantage of adopting SNG in Taiwan is that it could increase the capacity factor of combined-cycles in Taiwan. The study shows a possible way to use coal and reduce the CO2emission, since coal provides nearly half of the electricity generation in Taiwan in recent years.


Author(s):  
Mirko R. Bothien ◽  
Andrea Ciani ◽  
John P. Wood ◽  
Gerhard Fruechtel

Abstract Excess energy generation from renewables can be conveniently stored as hydrogen for later use as a gas turbine fuel. Also, the strategy to sequestrate CO2 from natural gas will require gas turbines to run with hydrogen-based fuels. In such scenarios, high temperature low emission combustion of hydrogen is a key requirement for the future gas turbine market. Ansaldo Energia’s gas turbines featuring sequential combustion have an intrinsic advantage when it comes to fuel flexibility and in particular hydrogen-based fuels. The sequential combustion system is composed of two complementary combustion stages in series: one premix stage followed by an auto-ignited second stage overcoming the limits of traditional premix combustion systems through a highly effective extra tuning parameter, i.e. the temperature between the first and the second stage. The standard Constant Pressure Sequential Combustion (CPSC) system as applied in the GT36 engine is tested, at high pressure, demonstrating that a modified operation concept allows stable combustion with no changes in combustor hardware for the whole range of natural gas and hydrogen blends. It is shown that in the range from 0% to 70% (vol.) hydrogen, stable combustion is achieved at full nominal exit temperature, i.e. without any derating and thus clearly outperforming other available conventional premixed combustors. Operation between 70% and 100% is possible as well and only requires a mild reduction of the combustor exit temperature. By proving the transferability of the single-can high pressure results to the engine, this paper demonstrates the practicality of operating the Ansaldo Energia GT36 H-Class gas turbine on fuels containing unprecedented concentrations of hydrogen while maintaining excellent performance and low emissions both in terms of NOx and CO2.


Author(s):  
Candy Hernandez ◽  
Vincent McDonell

Abstract Lean-premixed (LPM) gas turbines have been developed for stationary power generation in efforts to reduce emissions due to strict air quality standards. Lean-premixed operation is beneficial as it reduces combustor temperatures, thus decreasing NOx formation and unburned hydrocarbons. However, tradeoffs occur between system performance and turbine emissions. Efforts to minimize tradeoffs between stability and emissions include the addition of hydrogen to natural gas, a common fuel used in stationary gas turbines. The addition of hydrogen is promising for both increasing combustor stability and further reducing emissions because of its wide flammability limits allowing for lower temperature operation, and lack of carbon molecules. Other efforts to increase gas turbine stability include the usage of a non-lean pilot flame to assist in stabilizing the main flame. By varying fuel composition for both the main and piloted flows of a gas turbine combustor, the effect of hydrogen addition on performance and emissions can be systematically evaluated. In the present work, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and chemical reactor networks (CRN) are created to evaluate stability (LBO) and emissions of a gas turbine combustor by utilizing fuel and flow rate conditions from former hydrogen and natural gas experimental results. With CFD and CRN analysis, the optimization of parameters between fuel composition and main/pilot flow splits can provide feedback for minimizing pollutants while increasing stability limits. The results from both the gas turbine model and former experimental results can guide future gas turbine operation and design.


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