POWER November 2013 - 50

NUCLEAR
distinct requirements, " said Ben Mays, Comanche
Peak's vice-president of nuclear engineering
and support and a 33-year veteran
of the plant. " The way the WATCHMAN program
centralizes data and makes it broadly
available to all our users may have powerful
implications for developing and sharing best
practices, which is a time-honored tradition
in the nuclear industry, " said Mays. " If we
can inspire other nuclear power generators
to participate, the potential exists to make a
material contribution to advancing monitoring
and maintenance practices. "
Disruption in the New World of
Big Data
As remote monitoring capabilities become
more widespread, and the era of big data creates
expectations of universal transparency
and awareness, most large industrial production
operations will find themselves in cultural
transition. The traditional formula for
manual data collection, review, and problem
identification will become obsolete in favor
of highly efficient automated systems. The result
will be improved economies of scale and
less human investment to derive value from
the process. Technology and automation also
can assist in offsetting the forecasted impact
of workforce attrition and the associated loss
of vital knowledge and experience as personnel
retire.
" The automated data collection and diagnostic
elements of the WATCHMAN program
will never displace the onsite teams, " Carter
observed, " but the information can make
them a lot more powerful, save them hours of
legwork in route-based data collection, and
give them the visibility to get ahead of their
preventive maintenance, so they can manage
the work and not the other way around. "
" There's no question that this will be a
change from our traditional way of managing
predictive maintenance programs. " Flores
added, " but it's the next evolutionary leap
made possible by the Technology Age. Why
wouldn't we take full advantage of it if it
makes us better at what we do? "
Combining Approaches
The Comanche Peak wireless monitoring
pilot project will run for six months before
Luminant decides whether to make it a permanent,
integrated feature of its predictive
maintenance program and determines how
far it makes sense to expand the automated
service throughout the facility. The plant's
preexisting predictive maintenance program
covers approximately 800 pieces of machinery
on route-based manual data collection
programs. While periodic manual data collection
makes sense for a good portion of
these machines, there may be benefit to expanding
the automation capabilities where it
makes good business sense.
" Current best practice is almost always
some combination of higher frequency, automated
reporting with less-frequent, manual
route-based reporting-a combination we
support at many other customers, " Hurlock
observed.
Comanche Peak, and Flores in particular,
pride themselves on being innovative
leaders in the nuclear power industry. " This
pilot program is just another step in a longstanding
commitment by Comanche Peak
to continuous improvement, " said Flores.
" With information and diagnostic technologies
advancing as rapidly as they are, we
simply can't afford to stand still if these capabilities
can make us and our competitors
more efficient. " ■
-Dave Geswein is director, portal
operations for Azima DLI.
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