Condition based maintenance on turbogenerators: what makes it real?

The current economic situation in the global energy market demands a cost reduction in maintenance concurrently with high availability and reliability of critical plant components. A combination of state-of-the-art on-line monitoring and diagnostic systems with the necessary off-line inspections allows a more reliable operation with extended durations between maintenance intervals by applying modern data mining and expert systems. Prerequisites for such a condition based maintenance strategy are the incorporation of all available information of the generator (i.e., design knowledge, fleet experience, history of the machine) and all diagnosis and monitoring information.