Over the past 20 years, GE has been monitoring the health of its fleets, working with our users to get valuable insight and feedback, and making continuous improvements to our products. This effort has led to hardware and monitoring/analytics innovations that have produced a set of Next Gen ST Valve offerings.
Increase maintenance intervals, monitor asset health, and improve unit reliability and availability with GE’s Next Gen ST Valves. They provide real-time turbine valve condition monitoring and diagnostic and prognostic analytics needed to reliably keep your plant running smoothly.
Address common steam turbine valve-related maintenance issues—Next Gen ST Valves deliver a host of valuable benefits that aim to provide ROI in as few as two to three years.
With a host of proven benefits, GE’s Next Gen ST valves are a great choice for steam turbine operators looking to enhance reliability and availability.
Increase steam turbine reliability and availability up to 10 days per minor event.*
*Availability statistics apply to planned events only
Extend maintenance intervals from 3 to up to 6 factored years.
Enjoy demonstrated payback in as few as 2 – 3 years.
Expect reduced valve testing requirements from daily to weekly.
Implement a smarter, condition-based maintenance strategy.
Introduction to GE’s Next Gen ST valves
Benefits of our Next Gen ST valves
We’ve blended a robust set of hardware upgrades with digital monitoring and analytics systems to help you move from reactive to predictive health monitoring technology for your plant. Our offerings consist of:
With the GE’s Next Gen ST Valve offering, we’ve advanced our materials with improved oxidation resistance that can reduce oxidation rates by up to 3 – 4 times, as well as potentially reduce the risk of mechanical binding or valve sticking.
We’ve improved valve geometries to increase efficiency and to more effectively direct the steam flow and solid particulates (if any) away from the stop valve stem (a safety-critical component). This enhances the valve-seating angle, directing any foreign particles in the steam flow away from the stem.
Additionally, the pressure seal head has been produced with erosion-resistant materials to reduce particle velocities, protecting and shielding the stop valve stem from solid particle erosion (SPE). The pressure seal head also incorporates a patent-pending early warning system that can aid in the detection of any potential erosion that may occur—well before it becomes a forced outage risk.
Using existing and supplemental sensors coupled with proprietary digital and software algorithms, we can help you measure real-time critical operating parameters that can impact your valve’s safety, reliability, and performance.
The user interface (UI) for GE’s Next Gen ST Valve analytics is a web-enabled portal that can be accessed from anywhere within your power plant’s internal network. From this UI, real-time (diagnostic) and predictive (prognostic) analytics display both the current and trended health of the critical components of the valve. This information is invaluable for quickly diagnosing valve-related issues found during operation, and is vital for making informed decisions on maintenance timing and planning. Combining this monitoring with GE’s Next Gen ST Valve hardware can help customers move toward extended high-pressure and reheat-valve inspection and maintenance intervals.
GE’s Next Gen ST Valves can help mitigate the following issues that can lead to prolonged maintenance outages as well as costly forced outages:
With GE’s Next Gen ST Valves, we can more confidently anticipate when potential events like these would occur by field deployment of analytics.
SCOPE: replacement of valve internal components
Recommended for:
Software monitoring and diagnostics
Digital Lite—sensors and analytics with partial valve health monitoring
SCOPE: new valves and actuators
Recommended for:
Software monitoring and diagnostics
Digital Lite—full valve health-monitoring package offering enhanced operational tracking, trending, and life monitoring for improved asset management.
MSCVs and CRVs are key components for the safe and reliable operation of a steam turbine. The extended inspection intervals upgrade package will help create a schedule to ensure that ST valve inspections are executed in the time frame of GT a C-inspection (major inspection). The result is a shorter plant outage and reduced risk of valve failure. As part of the upgrade, the ST valve inspection interval is increased from 25 kEOH to 50 kEOH, while the lifetime consumption per start is reduced from 50 EOH to 25 EOH, allowing for additional plant flexibility.
A complementary digital solution called Valve and Actuator Monitoring System (VAMS) allows the integration of hardware upgrades (Control, Servo, Stop Valve) with Digital Analytics, which helps align the ST and GT outage duration. VAMS includes three upgrade solutions for MSCVs and CRVs that cover replacement of internals and part improvements—including software monitoring and diagnostics—to help improve the reliability and availability of your valves, reduce testing requirements, and extend maintenance intervals.
