Sessions

Ameren Corporation innovation team recognized early on successful Digital transformation includes integrating IOT with Virtual representation of the Plant and enabling it for easy access. A Digital Twin, is a solution and was chosen.  It involved Radiation Protection Monitoring and Visualization of areas, goals for the project included enhancing worker safety, providing real time plant data, and all data is overlaid on the 3D model for use by Operations and Radiation Protection. This involved developing an Application to achieve near real time monitoring of Dosimeter data in addition to tracking the location of the Dosimeter, all data feeds go through OSISOFT PI. Scanning was done with the Leica scanner, a scan of physical areas was the starting point of the project. The POC findings led to the conclusion by the Radiation Protection team at the plant reduction in manual work in capturing time based surveys and offering a real time single pane of glass view by connecting various data collections points and providing a visual representation of a virtual twin of the areas being accessed. The addition of a survey tool to the application gave the ability to automatically update survey information near real time to the single view. The benefits to the organization included improved worker safety and the application can be used to provide live data for pre - job and ALARA briefs.  In addition, FME Checkpoint Camera feed captured the image of the tools entered and exited the area and Artificial Intelligence is used to identify missing parts on tools this allows triggering of FME incident and notification process, thereby, eliminating paper-based process for both FME and Survey scenarios.

Fleet-level monitoring, especially for major critical assets like gas turbines, is well established and it has proven to improve power plant reliability and performance. But technologies are becoming available that go far beyond just monitoring, such as advanced analytics, interactive software, and the ability to capture and broadly apply SME (Subject Matter Expert) expertise. In this age of asset digitalization, when on-site SME experience is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, power plants of the future will be more autonomous and benefit from remote support. As the data streams increase, so do the capabilities, and it is imperative to take a total plant approach. Through targeting critical assets across the entire power plant and comparing their data outputs against advanced analytic models, outlier data points initiate the generation of an automated notification highlighting any potential operational risks. These notifications pinpoint the specific location of any equipment of concern, gauge its overall health and life consumption, and provide a recommended course of action to mitigate. Advanced speech recognition technologies, similar to Alexa or Google Home, enable human like conversation with the power plant assets, as well as beyond. Total plant data is collected, analyzed, trended, contextualized, and made available 24/7. Automated notifications flow through this interactive platform, integrating them with live KPI data and documentation such as O&M manuals, past outage reports, etc. Virtual presence technologies add the capability to assist with onsite troubleshooting from anywhere in the world through the use of mixed reality headsets, giving the on-site power plant teams an extensive toolbox of expert support to keep their plant running optimally. These new technologies go far beyond traditional monitoring and are already being applied at pilot plants. This paper is based on case studies highlighting the results from those pilot plants.

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