Presentation: Predictive Monitoring and Diagnostics of Luminant Pulverizers

Leveraging Luminant's PI System, Engineering Consultants Group have developed a pulverizer monitoring system that utilizes the PI SDK to read and write to the PI System archive with PI ProcessBook and a Web GUI. A new advanced pattern recognition system (PredictIT), developed specifically for the PI System, is utilized for anomaly detection. Luminant Energy and ECG Inc. will present a study in predicting and identifying failures in Pulverizers using the online system which is deployed at three of Luminant's coal plants. The system uses a SBC-based DAS with 11 external inputs per pulverizer to monitor key components of the mill for abnormal indications which could lead to a degradation in grinding element health, gearbox failures or bearing integrity problems. Results from high-speed data acquisition tests are written to the PI System where pattern recognition software detects minor changes in the process and provides an early warning about the change in condition to the end user. The presentation will highlight several findings and demonstrate the use of the pattern recognition and alarm management software.