Ansaldo Energia's diagnostics centre brings together the company's Customer Support services all over the world in a single centralised operating platform. The centre allows Ansaldo Energia to offer improved dependability, availability and maintenance for all its customers' energy generation plants. Ansaldo uses two front-end customer service centres, one in Genoa, Italy and the other in Abu Dhabi (UAE), handling routine monitoring and diagnostics operations through remote connection and responding to critical situations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The Genoa Diagnostics Centre employees experienced personnel capable of using the most recent highly sophisticated analytic and predictive diagnostic tools to make sure our customers' machines work without problems.
The data acquisition system, proprietary know-how and customised tools used by Ansaldo Energia's team of professionals permit effective monitoring of customers' rotating machinery – gas turbines, steam turbines and generators – independently of the technological platform employed. To manage this technological diversity, the team at the Diagnostics Centre relies on the assistance of Extended Engineering Support centres, where the staff employs a structured methodology for rapidly accessing the company's vast historic database of alarms that have been solved, both qualitatively and guided by information on how the problem was solved.
Plant parameters are controlled daily and periodic reports are supplied, in addition to feedback for optimising maintenance.
The Diagnostics Centre allows Ansaldo Energia to monitor plant operation with a range of services that may be supplied via remote connection, such as balancing, adjustment of gas turbine controllers, fine-tuning of combustion, and assistance starting up the turbine again. Advanced remote diagnostics and monitoring systems permit real-time connection for analysis of vibrations, performance, combustion, and generator diagnostics.
Moreover, the Ansaldo Predictive EXpert (APEX M&D) system, based on neural networks, supplies real-time predictive diagnostics information and early warning notifications for identification of the precursors of faults, so that Ansaldo Energia can quickly assess how to act to prevent a costly shutdown of the customer's plants.
This combination of expert processes and software works day and night for to keep customers' plants up and running, helping them achieve the greatest possible performance and dependability.
