AWARE™ Boiler Inspections

As deregulation climbs to the forefront of the power industry, every aspect of the power generation business is under the commercial and regulatory microscope. Keeping their power plants operational is undoubtedly the highest priority for the management team. Keeping the plants operational in a reliable and efficient manner is the biggest challenge for the technical staff. Effective maintenance is at the heart of achieving reliable and efficient operation. Boilers are one of the most critical and expensive equipment in a power station. The ability to track, trend, and report boiler conditions has proven cost effective in reducing outage incidences while maintaining reliable and efficient operation. In addition, utilities can now extend the duration between overhauls safely because they have accurate history and data analysis to support these recommendations.

AWARE has been successful in helping utilities do just that.

What AWARE Can Do For You?

AWARE can be used to manage your boiler inspection program. Every documentation, trending and reporting requirement of your boiler condition, maintenance activities, repairs and inspections are available to all members of the maintenance and management teams at all times.

AWARE is used during outages to document inspections/ assessments on individual pieces of equipment. While documenting current activities, past history and other relevant information associated with the equipment being worked on is available on the same screen.

The software guides the user through documenting inspections by presenting forms to be filled in. A unique form is available for each type of activity being documented (e.g. visual inspection, UT Data, etc.), and the type of equipment being worked on. The user has specific fields to fill in to document each activity, such as "Conditions Found", "Recommendations", "Priority", etc. This enables you to have a standardized approach to reporting inspection findings. Standardization insures that the right information is collected for each activity, and makes it much easier to review later.

AWARE allows you to include any type of data to document your assessment activities; including number, text, graphics, digital images, audio, video, and any form of multimedia supported in the industry today. AWARE supports many image formats such as BMP, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIF, Microsoft Picture, Windows Metafile (WMF), GIF, etc., for direct input into an assessment record. AWARE is also compatible with MS Office products, enabling users to attach documents, spreadsheets, etc. directly to an inspection record for inclusion in the inspection report.

Easily customizable to your specific needs, forms and tables are already available for collecting any information you may collect. Many pre-configured tables are delivered with the system for documenting conditions related to:

• Erosion
• Flex ties
• Gouges/ dents
• Heat shields
• Misalignments
• Rub Wear locations
• Steam cooled spacers
• Tube shields
• Water cooled spacers
• Welded lugs

Boiler Inspections are routinely done to identify problems, which then require engineers to recommend short and long term solutions to those problems. With every hour of an outage being critical, personnel need to insure that recommended solutions are tracked, prioritized, reviewed, approved, planned, and assigned to the appropriate personnel quickly and accurately. This insures the plant is back online on time, and with the best chances of avoiding future unplanned outages.

After filling in the appropriate forms to document the inspection, AWARE can be used to generate reports in both hard copy and PDF format. Typical reports include:

• During the outage, daily work list reports are generated providing a detailed list of recommendations made that day.
• Reports are generated that provide details of the conditions found/ recommendations to give craft personnel a better understanding of the work required
• At the end of the outage, a consolidated inspection report is automatically generated including photographs, conditions, recommendations, tables, etc. The report can be for the entire boiler, or each individual component (e.g. waterwalls, superheater, etc.).

Manage Outage Information
The AWARE suite of software enables personnel to manage the sharing of knowledge gained during boiler outage inspections. The engineer performing the inspection records conditions found, recommendations, and priorities for each component of the boiler as they are inspected. At the end of each day, a plant engineer reviews the recommendations flagged as needing immediate attention. If he concurs with the recommendation, it is then flagged for the planner. The planner logs onto the AWARE application, and can see a consolidated list of recommendations by component, priority, and date. He then schedules the work, and utilizing the CMMS system, assigns the work to new or existing work orders.