AWARE™ Outage Planning

AWARE maintains a history of all inspection/ assessment activities performed on individual equipment and builds up the knowledge base required to perform maintenance activities. It is especially beneficial for use during and planning for outages. With AWARE it is easy to find out who made what recommendations, when, and why to a single piece of equipment. Users will be able to make Run/Repair/Replace decisions with minimal risks based on the present conditions and past history.

AWARE offers the following benefits

1. Reduce your outage duration by streamlining the way you track, trend and report outage activities to support run/repair/replace recommendations
   
   
2. Reduce outage incidences or extending duration between outages by providing credible documentation of equipment conditions and their trends to support technical decisions.
   
   
3. Save time and money in preparing, documenting, trending, reporting and distributing all technical activities, and their results. Also a practical audit trailing tool to comply with regulatory requirements.
   
   
4. Save time and money in technical coordination among technical staff in supporting overhauls, inspections, testing, and proactive maintenance initiatives to improve plant availability and performance. Also a great training tool for new staff.
   
   
5. Save time and money in reduction of travel to plants by providing more comprehensive technical support to the plants via the network.
   
   
6. Is scalable to all plant equipment (Boilers, Turbines, Precipitators, etc.).

Planning for Upcoming Outages
To prepare for upcoming outages, the AWARE system is utilized to review recommendations that have not been implemented yet, and identify critical components that need attention. Personnel can then make more informed run/ repair/ replace decisions. Using AWARE, personnel are now able to track what the critical recommendations are, why they are critical, and which recommendations can be disregarded and/ or postponed.

The Maintenance, Condition Assessment, and Technical Services Groups can all review previous outage work history and related inspection results documented in AWARE to provide recommendations for what needs to be done during an upcoming outage. A single consolidated list of recommendations is then created to guide the outage planning process. If there are questions regarding why a recommendation is made, all the backup information is available to the other users with only a single mouse click:

• As found conditions
• Measurements or readings that were taken
• Photographs
• Sketches
• Analyses (e.g. met lab reports, etc.)

Users only need access to a web browser to see the information, so the headache of insuring the application is installed, and the appropriate drives are mapped on each individual machine go away.

Based on the recommended work requests, the Planning Department schedules the next outage and supporting maintenance activities. AWARE provides all the essential technical data needed to facilitate coordination between the planning dept., tech support group, the maintenance dept, and others. This will ensure that the right equipment is planned for repair/replacement, the required parts are ordered, and the necessary manpower is assigned.

During Outages/Post Outage Reporting
Plant 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.

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, PCX, TGA, TIF, LAD, JPEG, CALS, MacPaint, GEM Image, Microsoft Picture, Photo CD, SUN raster, Macintosh PICTURE, Postscript raster, Windows Metafile (WMF), GIF, etc., for direct input into an assessment record. AWARE also interfaces directly with digital cameras and scanners using the TWAIN interface.

The AWARE suite of software enables personnel to manage the sharing of knowledge gained during plant outage inspections. The engineer performing the inspection records conditions found, recommendations, and priorities for each component of the plant 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.

Summary of Features:

• Online forms provide an easy to use interface to document findings, and insure a standardized approach is used. The inspector and/ or analyst clearly sees what information is required to be filled in for each component/ activity.
• Inspection findings/ recommendations are attached to specific pieces of equipment (e.g. Superheater, air heater, Mill 1a, etc.) making it easy to review inspection history on a component-by-component basis later.
• Running as a web-application means information can be accessed from any computer on the intranet with a web browser. Software is installed on a single server, eliminating the hassle of installing software on individual machines and/ or requiring the proper drives to be mapped for each user.
• Built in security can be used to allow specific users access to specific fields. For example, a contractor may fill in conditions found & recommendations, but be restricted from filling in fields for internal comments.
• Pictures & other types of files are easily attached.

The system is also utilized to generate a number of reports:

• 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 plant, or each individual component (e.g. waterwalls, feedwater heaters, blades, etc.).