New system cuts gas turbine manufacturing time

A digital solution will analyse temperature at various points on the gas turbine parts as they are assembled and cooled, allowing operators to know when the next operation can be performed, reducing wait time between operations and improving quality monitoring. The pilot application was built and deployed for GE Power's gas turbine manufacturing plant in Greenville, South Carolina.

During the turbine manufacturing process, rotor stacking is a key process and needs extremely high levels of precision. If the rotor wheels are stacked incorrectly due to differences in the surface temperature, it will require reassembly, incurring heavy additional costs and two to three weeks of shipment delays. Tata Consultancy Services' new digital solution provides automatic data collection of ambient room and rotor surface temperatures, measuring for unacceptable variations, notifying workers when the next operation may proceed, and alerting workers to any non-uniformity. This application is built on the intelligent LED platform by GE and Intel that can reduce costs and energy consumption and provide data collection and analytics capabilities.

This platform is integrated with sensors that monitor temperature, humidity and any physical object presence, transmitting the data to an Intel Atom-based gateway where the information is streamed to the Predix cloud.