OUR LOCATIONS
We can provide our services to power plants worldwide
Bradenton, Florida
941 - 527 - 6196
941 - 755 - 5229 (FAX)
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
414 - 698 - 5644
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OUTAGE SUPPORT
SERVICES
Z-R Consulting has frequently been called for assistance following plant outages where all work was performed to “industry standards” by all initially involved parties, including shop repairs, balancing, and realignment and reinstallation, but where the unit still could not operate upon restart (or could only operate on the edge of allowable margins). Z-R Consulting has found that “industry standards” contain assumptions on expected rotor condition and rotordynamics behavior, and are only fully acceptable when dealing with rotors measuring within the initial OEM runout tolerances or guidelines from ISO 1940.
However, in many “special cases” (which are quite common in the rotor service industry), unexpected operational excursions or simply many years of rotor operation have created rotor bows, eccentricities or coupling defects outside of ISO 1940 tolerances. In these cases, “standard industry practices” are often insufficient and do not fully address rotordynamics behavior caused by such defects. Upon unit restart, this can result in lost days or weeks of power production for field balancing (which is not true balancing) or adjustments to patch up the problem, which often leads to larger problems in the future.
Through many years of experience in dealing with such “special cases”, Z-R Consulting has developed a full turbine-generator outage approach that is guaranteed to identify and fully remedy all rotor flaws, such that a smooth post-outage restart without needing field balancing can be guaranteed if all recommendations are properly followed. Z-R Consulting’s approach is designed to fit readily within a standard outage plan, and only adds minimal time and expense to acquire all required data for our proper analysis, but is guaranteed to save the plant substantial costs for future repairs or downtime in the long run.
Please click here for a document that outlines Z-R Consulting's outage support philosophy and procedures in detail.
Z-R Consulting also recently presented and published a new paper at the MFPT 2015 conference, presenting a complete outage strategy for turbine-generator rotors that addresses all sources of rotor vibration and guarantees a smooth restart without the need for field balancing.
Our methods and approach differ from many standard operating procedures, and are designed to be more thorough, and to eliminate the chance of any problems or “surprises” once back in the field. When the rotor leaves the shop, it is assured that it will be ready to run upon proper installation.
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