Plant Services - July 2008 - (Page 25)

One of the largest U.S. nuclear power plants, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in San Diego County, Calif., recently tied its varied condition-monitoring systems to the Ivara EXP Enterprise performancemanagement “middleware” system and is now interfacing that to SAP’s Plant Maintenance module. The Ivara solution develops condition-based activities by defining the frequency, scope and related information, and sending it to SAP to be managed. The system aggregates information from “siloed pockets of data” that have now been narrowed to two main data systems (one for nuclear and another for conventional fossil fuel and hydroelectric power). Despite the availability of off-the-shelf interfaces, the project team wanted more application-specific integration. The team, led by Darryl Barney, monitoring and asset reliability system product manager, integrated several systems and included standard interfaces as well as custom programming of 17 connections between Ivara and SAP to collect condition-monitoring data where the plant wanted deeper-thanstandard functionality. “Fortunately, our databases were in Oracle so we were able to use a single, common interface,” Barney says. Integration efforts have in part been prompted by the need for continuous improvement and meeting a critical reliability standard (INPO AP-913). But the results of having a seamless, central repository include reducing some task times from hours to minutes. SONGS reaches silos decades in military applications, and represents an ideal that some might say has never been realized. Even the definitions of CBM – and updated “CBM+” – are varied enough to defy an accepted standard. But a simplified, serviceable definition is “Tracking the condition of equipment and assets to perform maintenance activities only when the variables of an asset or piece of equipment indicate the risk of an impending failure.” Consultant Alan Johnston says, “Historically, CBM has had greater emphasis in aerospace and defense, in the process industries and at utilities, where there’s an extremely high cost related to an unpredicted failure. People can die aircraft can crash nuclear subs can go boom.” But how are we doing at bringing CBM to bear on the more prosaic problems in typical manufacturing plants? When he’s not at his desk at Alabama’s Redstone Arsenal, Johnston is active as president of the Management Open Systems Alliance (MIMOSA), or chairing Open O&M, a superset of standards groups promoting integration between the worlds of reliability and maintenance with enterprise computing and risk management. Open O&M is an amalgamation of standards groups (ISA, OPC Foundation, WBF and OAGi) whose mission Johnston defines as “a group of standards organizations that have agreed to work with each other to July 2008 Open O&M: Standard of standards make their standards interoperable, so their products and systems based on those standards will also be interoperable.” Why is the scope so broad? Because, he explains, “The corporate guys don’t generally come down to the maintenance department and ask those guys for their viewpoint on interoperability standards.” It’s up to maintenance leaders to “step up and be true peer partners with their enterprise systems counterparts in the organization If they don’t, decisions will be made without their input.” The core MIMOSA architecture might well provide the best backbone for CBM by facilitating the integration of three major components: reliability management, maintenance management and condition management (Figure 1). Each of these is broken into pieces. For example, “open condition management” starts with sensors, data input and manipulation, alarms and events, diagnostic health assessment and prognostic assessments. The current state of automated condition-managing tools, according to Johnston, is at the level of diagnostic health assessments, where vibration tests, portable data collectors and other means are used to collect data, plot trends and analyze the deterioration and usable life span of assets. This is akin to a doctor who knows what’s wrong. But that doctor can’t give a prognosis without a broader knowledge of what’s going on. In a CBM context, even if systems are capable of coming close to root-cause analysis, integration is generally insufficient to close the loop with automation. So, the next frontier for maintenance technology is in this area of prognosis assessment. Communication and context Operations and maintenance used to be separate, but management philosophies and advances in technology are bringing them together. Business standards such as industrial Ethernet and Microsoft-based connectivity standards 25 www.PLANTSERVICES.com http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com

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Plant Services - July 2008 Contents From the Editor Letters The PS Files Up and Running Crisis Corner Asset Manager Technology Toolbox Cover Story Compressors Power Transmission Flooring Web Hunter In the Trenches Product Picks Classifieds Energy Expert

Plant Services - July 2008

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