Remote Monitoring

More than 1,100 units in turbine fleet monitored
Real-time data on impending failures and performance diagnostics

GE Intelligent Platforms has announced that GE Energy’s Performance & Reliability Centre (PRC) in Atlanta (GA US) has standardised on a remote monitoring and diagnostic platform that utilizes the company’s Proficy® Historian, Proficy SOA, Proficy Workflow and Proficy CIMPLICITY software.

This system monitors more than 1,100 units in GE Energy’s turbine fleet and provides customers with real-time data on impending failures and performance diagnostics. The legacy system utilized an Oracle based relational database architecture that consumed more than 50 terabytes of storage across four database instances. Over time, the legacy solution has become costly to maintain and support and was not sufficiently extensible to sustain future growth.

“GE Intelligent Platforms delivers a solution that is flexible and scalable while lowering ongoing maintenance costs through simplified IT infrastructure and reduced storage demands. Improving availability and access to fleet data while leveraging diagnostic workflow capabilities will drive improved productivity of subject matter experts,” said Justin Eggart, Performance and Reliability Center leader for GE Energy Services. “The new system will enhance our focus on delivering customer value, applying advanced Monitoring and Diagnostics solutions, while proactively managing the performance and reliability of turbines and other assets in the GE fleet.”

GE Intelligent Platforms’ Next Generation M&D platform (Gen X), is based on proven, Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) software products such as Proficy Historian, a best in class platform for data acquisition and storage designed to handle time sequence data at speeds significantly faster than traditional relational databases algorithms that simply aren’t available in relational models, while also supporting a range of data compression. The result is better performance with lower disk utilization without any loss of data resolution.

“This architecture sets the standard inside GE for remote monitoring and diagnostics platforms and the PRC stands as a shining example of how GE can leverage its domain expertise into Knowledge Service offerings,” said Erik Udstuen, Vice President Software and Services for GE Intelligent Platforms. “The solution allows GE Energy to further expand its robust state-of-the art services allowing customers to tap into GE’s deep domain expertise in an efficient and effective way.”

Also key to the solution is GE’s breakthrough work process management backbone for application development, Proficy Workflow, a highly scalable software solution due to its efficient storage model; Proficy CIMPLICITY -client/server based visualization and control solution that helps you visualize your operations, perform supervisory automation and deliver reliable information to higher-level analytic applications resulting in faster responsiveness, reduced costs and increased profitability.

“We proved that our Proficy Software’s integrated capability to collect, organize, analyze, and drive work processes around massive volumes of real-time data could meet the needs of GE Energy now and into the future,” Udstuen concluded.