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A consortium of the nation's power plants identified boiler tube failures as the #1 cause of plant failures and service outages. NCI’s Boiler Maintenance Workstation, or BMW, was developed to provide power plants with the ability to track maintenance records, monitor corrective actions, analyze predictive failure models, and view CAD drawings and images of the boiler tube systems.
Since its initial development, NCI's BMW has been distributed at over 400 plants worldwide; the initial deployment at just 16 utilities helped realize an estimated savings of more than $200 million in 10 years. The Electric Power Research Institute named the product one of the "20 greatest achievements of the last 20 years." NCI's Power Plant Maintenance Database
Before BMW was formally developed and released, power plants were tracking plant maintenance issues on paper, a painstaking process which never provided an efficient and thorough end-to-end analysis system. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and NCI envisioned a database system that would track all such issues electronically, providing end-user access to maintenance records, predictability tools, and CAD drawings and images of the pertinent hardware.
NCI developed the Boiler Maintenance Workstation (BMW), which has been a tremendous maintenance tracking tool for over 400 plants throughout the world. The tool incorporates EPRI's Boiler Tube Failure Reduction Program, a proven set of principles used by utilities for preventing boiler tube failures in power plants.
System Benefits
- Helps document, manage, and analyze information pertinent to establishing a boiler maintenance and failure prevention program
- Eliminates paper-based record-keeping of critical, mission-sensitive maintenance data, and organizes those records in a single-source database of reportable, actionable material
- Utilizes the EPRI-proven guidelines outlined in the Boiler Tube Failure Reduction program
- BMW is Windows-based and fully supported through Client/Server architecture over a standard TCP/IP network.
- Expanded capabilities cover other plant systems such as high-energy piping, turbines, and generators
System Features
- Tube Records Module, a database for recording boiler tube failures, repair, and failure analysis reports.
- Water Wall Tube Condition Module, which is used to analyze ultrasonic tube wall thickness data and plan future inspections and tube replacements
- ESCARTA Module, an expert system used to diagnose boiler tube failure mechanisms.
- TUBELIFE Module, which predicts the remaining life of super-heater and re-heater tubes based on stress and temperature histories, estimated from the tube wall thickness and steam-side scale thickness, respectively.
- Boiler Graphics Module, which allows the importing of scaled CAD drawings of super-heater, re-heater, and economizer sections using DXF file format and attach other objects representing failure and repair locations, tube materials, NDE data, etc.
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