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Losing track of time-sensitive parts can be expensive and potentially dangerous.
As gas turbine technology has steadily advanced, "critical" gas turbine parts, such as combustion and hot gas path components, have significantly changed in terms of initial cost, repair cost, expected life limits and order lead times. Maintaining a detailed history of these critical gas turbine parts is fundamental to minimizing lifetime costs associated with owning and operating gas turbines.
Without the ability to monitor and measure the expected total cost of serialized gas turbine critical parts in an almost realtime manner, the owner's potential risk exposure is substantial. This risk can take the form of an expensive part that must be scrapped before achieving its expected life or a potential safety issue in which a part is unknowingly operated beyond its life limit. In either case, a large potential risk can be mitigated with a relatively straightforward process: tracking serialized parts by location and their accumulated age.
Although the requirement to properly track serialized parts may seem simplistic, most gas turbine owners/operators today do not adequately capture this business-critical information. Many depend on service agreement providers to track this information, primitively capture this information themselves with insular spreadsheet-based formats or depend on periodic written inspection reports to provide them with information. At best, maintaining and retrieving meaningful information from any of these sources can be a difficult, time-consuming task. At worst, the parts information may be lost forever, along with the opportunity to actively manage these critical and expensive assets.
Critical Elements
When developing a parts tracking procedure, the owner must weigh the potential value of tracking parts within a fleet against the time and money spent to maintain the information contained within the tracking process.
A strong economic case exists for tracking critical parts. As one example, a first stage row of blades on an F technology gas turbine can cost as much as $3 million. The time and cost required to properly track these critical parts from a remaininglife perspective would pale in comparison to the possibility that these parts exceed their assigned time at temperature limits and are not repairable as a result. As another example, consider an owner who must take the most conservative approach in removing, destructive-testing...