The 1,320-MW Rovinari Power Plant in Romania is the second-largest power-generating facility in the country. Just this week, it announced it will implement Emerson Process Management's CSI 6500 Machinery Health Monitor for its critical machinery.
What makes this interesting is the CSI 6500 will be integrated with Emerson’s Ovation expert control system, which will provide monitoring and control of the boiler, balance-of-plant processes, and management of the plant’s power output. Sensors connected to the CSI 6500 will gather vibration data from the steam turbine and feed water pump for analysis with the Emerson AMS Suite predictive maintenance software.
"The CSI 6500 will integrate seamlessly with the Ovation control system to provide our maintenance and operations teams with real-time machinery health feedback," says Bratuianu Preda, instrumentation and controls chief engineer for the plant. "By detecting changes in machinery health, we can effectively plan our maintenance program, reducing downtime and increasing our operating efficiency."
The continued integration of maintenance, monitoring and control systems keeps inching its way up the food chain. As more maintenance and reliability issues are handled on the plant floor, sensors and control platforms can provide information upstream and downstream by incorporating performance data into plant-wide ERP systems and by providing alarming, trending and diagnostic instruction to operators. Plus, there’s the cost savings of using sensors wired directly to the I/O relays and allowing the existing controller to manage the data monitoring.
