New Tools to Monitor Critical Vibration of End-windings in Turbo-generators

Power producers, either public or independent entities, have a mandate to provide an essential service to its subscribers; this, in return, generates income to the supplier of electricity. Needless to say, the reliability and availability of the generator-turbine groups are of utmost concern. Shortage of electrical supply is detrimental to the customer, and downtime quickly translates into loss of revenues and high repair costs to the power producer. Good maintenance of the machine is to be performed to ensure its availability, and condition-based maintenance has been experimented to be a most cost-efficient approach in the matter: it provides a suitable management tool to assist in deciding the optimal timing to do maintenance and to assess the tasks that really need to be done based on facts. However, in turbo-generators a lot of attention has been traditionally put on the turbine side of the machine. The generator part that actually outputs the megawatts has been somehow left in the dark. The evolution of on-line monitoring technologies has provided innovative solutions, new tools, to fill that monitoring gap. And a number of power producers in various countries are presently benefiting from the implementation of new monitoring approaches on their generators.