April - Library

cons and class-leading features you would expect from FLIR.’
E-Series is a successful combination of strong industrial
design and lightweight materials. The result is a camera that is
ergonomically a pleasure to use and one that will not weigh you
down as you go about your business, whatever the application.
‘We expect demand for the E-Series to come from a wide
spectrum of sectors including manufacturing, R & D, automotive,
electronics, logistics, renewable energy, construction and HVAC
all looking for value for money, user-friendly thermal imager
rugged enough to take it and still deliver superior image quality.’
FLIR E-Series boasts a host of new
features including:
• Thumbnail JPEG image gallery
• High thermal sensitivity Accuracy
± 2% and 0.1°C
• Long life battery 4 hours
• Fusion Picture-in-Picture (P-I-P)
• Copy images to USB
• Thermal fusion (E40/E50)
• Instant reports (E60)
• Text and voice annotations
• Transmit images to smart iphone
or tablet PC
www.flir.com
Maintenance News
Marine Software’s PM Job Lock
U.K. based Marine Software Ltd have successfully supplied their
MPM - Marine Planned Maintenance solution to Swedish based
Rederi AB Uman. These PMS systems will be installed on three
Gibraltar flagged self-discharging general cargo vessels, which
operate mainly in the Baltic and North Sea regions.
Marine Software also delivered a central OPM – Office Planned
Maintenance system for Rederi AB Uman’s Karlshamn office.
This provides all shore side technical staff the ability to monitor
fleet maintenance status ashore.
Reederei AB Uman were very interested in the “PM Job Lock”
module, to ensure once the MPM database was operational onboard,
that no crew member would be able to make Job Card
amendments to job instructions or interval periods, even as the
system administrator.
The central office OPM users could then control these changes
ashore and submit simple job card update files to the vessels
for the reflective changes to be made. This type of control is
becoming increasingly popular throughout Marine Software’s
client base, as it ensures on-going database integrity especially
for same class sister vessels.
Mr Björn Holm, Fleet Manager Comments:
“For us the choice of planned maintenance system was simple;
a user-friendly program with a lot of module functions that can be
built on to fit just our organisation, and a great support function
as well.“ www.marinesoftware.co.uk
Guohua Wind Turbines Choose SKF Remote
Monitoring
When the fourth biggest wind farm operator in China increases
their installed capacity by 50% within one year, that indicates
a company that knows its business. And one of the business
aspects that all wind farm operators need to take care of is “turbine
reliability” – keeping the turbines turning as much as possible
and keeping maintenance activities down to a minimum.
Reduced or controlled maintenance is always a valuable
contribution to bottom line profitability, but when you’ve got
2000 MW of installed capacity then you are talking about huge
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amounts of money. That is why Mr. Zhou Weihua, Deputy General
Manager of the Production Department, took a decision in 2008
to evaluate his maintenance strategy and the technology to be
applied within that strategy. A critical decision was to look for the
most reliable and experienced way to determine the health of his
turbines in the fastest and most effective way.
With a few different turbine designs and sizes out in the field
he needed the best possible way to get reliable and regular
information about the general condition of selected turbines of
these designs and types. At the same time he wanted identify
any typical negative trends that might occur in the various, but
differing, field operating conditions that the turbines would be
deployed to.
Not being satisfied with his previous assessment process of
only using temperature readings of gearbox oil and generator
bearing housings, he wanted to investigate on-line monitoring,
where vibration signals from critical components are collected
24 hours a day and analysed to determine exactly if and where
problems are developing, and how severe any problems were.
This type of monitoring would also provide valuable knowledge
that could allow critical maintenance to be planned and avoid
unexpected and very costly breakdowns.
His first step was to make a deep investigation of what technology
was available and the quality and knowledge of the suppliers.
These investigations covered all the key suppliers of such
technology but contacts with other wind farm operators in China
quickly brought him to consider SKF and their turbine monitoring
system for further discussions. After direct contact with SKF, I
heard that they had recently been successful with remote online
monitoring, where data from the monitored turbine in the
wind farm were transmitted by Internet to their specialists for
analysis.
In order to get first hand experience of their remote on-line
capability he visited their Intelligence Centre Wind (ICW), their
major wind turbine diagnostic centre in Hamburg, Germany”.
“In Hamburg I saw examples of almost all the capabilities
of a SKF WinCon system, because there were so many
systems deployed in so many wind farms. The level of detail
that the system could give was clearly demonstrated, and the
explanations by the people making the analysis clearly indicated
that they knew all about wind turbines and the critical machinery.
The Hamburg visit gave me the confidence to set up a field trial
on some turbines in Guohua wind farms in 2009”.
The field trial involved 11 SKF WindCon systems to be deployed
across 3 wind farms; one in Jiangsu province, one in Shadong
province and one in Inner Mongolia. Around the time SKF were
installing their systems in the Guohua turbines SKF had opened
a Remote Condition Monitoring Centre in Shanghai. Having SKF
experts so close was an added benefit to Mr. Zhou and he was
anxious to get the systems operating and see what the results
would be.
The data was collected on
a local server at each wind
farm and transmitted to an
SKF server in Shanghai for
analysis. Any immediate
emergency situation would
be reported at once but an
‘emergency situation’ was
not detected at start up of
the monitoring, and a report was issued once per month to the
wind farm site managers and Mr Zhou.
The reports contained the detailed vibration spectra for the key
components being monitored, together with a brief statement that
summarised the analysis of the data in terms of the condition of
the component. But there was also a “report grid” that indicated
the components being monitored and each one had one of 3
colours; green, yellow or red to give immediate indication of the
condition, with green being OK, yellow being a slight to major
Vol 24 No 2