Azima DLI recently announced a teaming agreement with Luminant to wirelessly monitor mechanical integrity at the 2,300-megawatt Comanche Peak nuclear power plant in Somervell County, Texas.
"This technology will allow Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant to further enhance our already robust equipment monitoring capabilities," said Rafael Flores, the plant's chief nuclear officer. "We are proud to be the first nuclear plant in the country to leverage this new wireless reporting system."
Comanche Peak is piloting Azima DLI's Watchman analysis program, which captures critical machinery health data via a wireless network tested in collaboration with the Electric Power Research Institute to study the feasibility of a new digital control system compliant with IEEE 802.11 wireless radio emission standards.
The Watchman analysis program automatically captures current machine health data and populates a hosted database. This database is accessible by a web browser to facility maintenance personnel, managers, operators in Luminant's Power Optimization Center and Azima DLI machine health analysts, all of whom have access to predictive analytics and measures of production risk on a 24/7 basis.
By collaborating under the teaming agreement, Azima DLI and Luminant expect to share both technical and strategic cost and quality benchmarking standards resulting from several years of work invested in optimizing the Watchman solution. In keeping with nuclear industry practices, the intention is to make available the current state of best practices in machine health remote monitoring with a commitment to continuous improvement based on feedback captured from broad-based industry adoption.
"In an industry like ours, safety and reliability are of the upmost importance," said Clint Carter, director of operations services at Luminant's headquarters in Dallas. "Our commitment to continuous improvement embraces new technology, and we are pleased to pilot this program for both Azima DLI and the nuclear industry."
"Azima DLI's cultural commitment to responsiveness depends on accurate, timely predictive analytics, all of which are foundational to our long-standing relationship with Luminant," said Azima DLI CEO Burt Hurlock. "We strive to help the company maintain peak availability at Comanche Peak, while we also pursue the elimination of unplanned maintenance and capital expenditures."
For more information, visit www.azimadli.com.
