Inspection Management Software for Gas and Steam Turbines

What Can Aware^TM Do For You?

Aware can be used to manage your turbine inspection program offering you Total Quality Assurance.  Every documentation, trending and reporting requirement of your turbine condition, maintenance activities, repairs and inspections are available to all members of your teams at all times. The software enables personnel to manage the flow of information during turbine outage inspections, and turn that information knowledge for subsequent outages.  

The engineer performing the inspection records conditions found, recommendations, and priorities for each component of the turbine as they are inspected. At the end of each day, a plant engineer reviews the recommendations flagged as needing immediate attention. If he concurs with the recommendation, it is then flagged for the planner. The planner logs onto the Aware application, and can see a consolidated list of recommendations by component, priority, and date. He then schedules the work, and utilizing the existing work order management system, assigns the work to new or existing work orders.

The software guides the user through documenting inspections by presenting forms specific to the equipment being worked on and inspection being done.  The user has specific fields to fill in to document each activity, such as "Conditions Found", "Recommendations", "Priority", etc. This enforces a standardized approach to reporting inspection findings. Standardization insures that the right information is collected for each activity, and makes it much easier to review later.

One feature particularly suited for turbine equipment is the 'work package' concept.  This mimics the standard inspections that are done on turbines (e.g. hot gas path inspection, or A, B, C, etc.), and pre-defines all of the equipment and the relevant activities that need to be carried out. This further allows standardization by allowing users to create a consistent list of equipment and/or activities to be included in each type of inspection.

The system generates a number of reports for sharing of information.  They provide details of the conditions found/ recommendations to give craft personnel a better understanding of the work required, and engineers/analysts information to perform further studies.  During the outage, daily work list reports are generated providing a detailed list of recommendations made that day.  At the end of the outage, a consolidated inspection report is automatically generated including photographs, conditions, recommendations, tables, etc. The report can be for the entire turbine or each individual component (e.g. blades, bearings, seals, etc).

Turbine inspections are routinely done to identify problems, which then require engineers to recommend short and long term solutions to those problems. Every hour of an outage is critical, and personnel need to be certain that recommended solutions are tracked, prioritized, reviewed, approved, planned, and assigned to the appropriate personnel quickly and accurately. This ensures the plant is back online on time, and with the best chances of avoiding future unplanned outages.