PS-PLUS™ - Maintenance Support for Gas Turbine Plants

For all systems and components in high-value combustor and hot gas path assemblies and parts for plants powered by gas turbines (simple or combined cycle), PS-PLUS provides owners and operators of electric power plants with:

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• Accurate and continuous modeling of plant reliability
• Identification of systems and components that have significant impact on plant performance
• Optimized timing adjustment of costly inspections based on continuous equipment condition monitoring, and risk evaluation regarding increasing time between inspections
• Accurate prediction of the cost of spare parts procurement policies
• Assessment of maintenance staffing requirements

A Comprehensive Solution

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PS-PLUS is centered around a predictive life-cycle plant model based on Clockwork’s SPAR simulation technology. The model encompasses the condition states of all critical plant equipment, assemblies, and parts - including turbines, fuel gas assemblies, and individual turbine buckets.

PS-PLUS assesses the condition of items by testing the likelihood of failure at any given point in time, taking into consideration equipment condition, age, time since last overhaul, load, environmental conditions, and the effects of external conditions such as power surges, lightning, and operator errors.

Continuous Power Production Capacity Assessment

PS-PLUS predicts the plant’s life-cycle behavior by running the plant model into the future, continuously assessing power production capacity based on:

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• Time-dependent attributes for each piece of equipment, assembly, or components - such as age and aging rates;
• A description of each item’s role in the plant, together with its relationship to other equipment - to determine the effect of equipment down time on other equipment and on the plant as a whole;
• A description of infrastructure resources - repair and maintenance personnel and spare parts - to predict the time and cost of bringing failed equipment back to operational status;
• Preventive and predictive maintenance activities planned to detect incipient failures;
• The frequency of planned outages, their duration, and their affect on production;
• An analysis of plant down time causes, to determine the relative contribution of each item to reduction in power production.

Highly-Accurate and Versatile

PS-PLUS predictions are uniquely accurate due to the system's consideration of a broad spectrum of crucial factors such as:

• Time-dependent phenomena like aging and event response deadlines;
• The dynamic behavior of the system - dynamic reconfiguration and induced failures;
• The effect of maintenance and overhaul actions on equipment performance;
• The availability of limited resources such as repair and maintenance teams, specialized equipment, and spare parts.

PS-PLUS can operate as a stand-alone system or may be integrated with a plant operations and maintenance decision support system (DSS). When part of a DSS, PS-PLUS incorporates real-time data, updating the DSS automatically with simulation output. PS-PLUS(E), the enterprise version of PS-PLUS, tracks and manages critical and pooled spares on a regional or national basis.

For more information:

PS-PLUS – Power Generation Plant Operations Margin & Risk Analysis and Power Industry Solutions