British Energy saves with condition monitoring

Letchworth, UK - British Energy has saved money and improved the reliability and flexibility of its chemistry condition monitoring through the installation of a new system for shop floor data collection and statistical process control.

 The new system - NWA Quality Monitor  from Northwest Analytical (NWA) of Portland, Oregon and supplied by  Letchworth-based Adept Scientific - is designed for flexibility and ease of use, said Gary Brodt, a contracted systems support engineer within one of the company’s chemistry sections.

"This meant that during system development, chemists with little or no database experience could learn enough of the package to make interface modifications in order to deliver a system that exactly matched their day-to-day requirements,” said Brodt.

The NWA package is designed to allow standardised workflow processes to be built to match the needs of a specific facility, stores data from multiple workstations in a central database and provides live charting and analysis of quality data.

Brodt and his team have continued to make minor modifications to the system since its implementation as more historical data is migrated to the new platform and additional plant signals are added – all with no disruption to users.
Work is now underway on the next phase that will integrate more of NWA Quality Analyst’s capabilities in order to produce bespoke data analysis to allow both plant personnel and corporate staff to gain a rapid, detailed overview of plant performance.

Brodt concluded, “Our use of the NWA software from Adept Scientific has brought our data management process into the 21st century by making it possible to capture live data at the source where the data is generated, then analyse the data in the office that is remote to all of the labs ... Further development will provide even more improvements to our Statistical Process Control analysis to highlight what part of the plant may be trending towards fault conditions.”