Utilities Machine Health Solutions
Coal | Waste to Energy | Water Treatment | Nuclear
Reduce Unplanned Downtime with Utilities Case Studies
Boiler Feed Water Pumps
Most industrial pumps operate at less than half of their potential efficiency, usually due to poor operating conditions and practices that can be impossible to pinpoint with traditional approaches to maintenance.
- Pumps consume 25% of all industrial energy
- Pumps typically operate at 40% efficiency
- Inefficiency costs $500,000 on average over the pump’s lifespan
Cooling Towers
Cooling towers are hard to reach and hard to monitor, so many maintenance pros miss key indicators of imminent failure. Tower failure can have downstream impacts on almost all production processes.
- $1,000/hour downtime cost
- $50,000 in equipment costs per failure
- $100,000+ cost savings per avoided failure
Induced/Forced Draft Fans
Route-based maintenance doesn’t capture the full picture of ID/FD fan health. These fans are large, putting relatively small data anomalies lower on the priority list — but they are often a warning sign of imminent failure.
- Up to $20,000/hour downtime cost
- $250,000 in equipment costs per failure
- $300,000+ cost savings per avoided failure
Executive Panelists
Q&A session featured at the 2024 Manufacturing the Future Summit.
Lou Romano, KCF Technologies | David Bonfante, Georgia-Pacific | Tatiana Borges, RigCLOUD | John Eutsey, Synthomer | Alex Puentes, Carpenter Technology
Utilities Case Study Spotlight
10 MW loss prevented is
$2.5-10M
in savings
Leveraging Advanced Wireless Monitoring Solutions to Optimize Performance and Minimize Thermal Losses
Nuclear power plants use large amounts of water for cooling, with more than half of the energy produced by a nuclear power plant lost as heat. However, accurately tracking thermal output can be a challenge.
Susquehanna Steam Electric Station (SSES), a division of Talen Energy, was tasked with addressing this industry-wide problem and partnered with KCF Technologies to develop a solution. Through a comprehensive hardware and software platform, SSES is already seeing quick wins from its new investment.
Access More Case Studies
Why KCF
$4B
customer savings
75k
hours of prevented downtime
24/7
hours of monitoring
How Our Utilities Machine Health Optimization Platform Works
Manufacturers and producers in the energy sector have to keep a watchful eye on O&M costs, and every machine failure can cause that number to creep up. Traditional route- or time-based monitoring doesn’t capture smaller data anomalies that can alert your team to imminent failure before it’s too late.
SMARTdiagnostics, our comprehensive machine health platform, wirelessly and continuously transmits machine health data to a central database from individual monitoring points on your assets. Its advanced analytics capabilities get to the root cause of machine health issues, and its human-in-the-loop architecture ensures compliance and correct action.
Improve Thermal Performance
Thermal losses in a combined-cycle plant can have a serious impact on overall plant efficiency. Just one valve out of place can result in several megawatts of lost energy production capacity.
Thermal loss detection and documentation can be a time-consuming, manual task. Continuous remote monitoring via pressure and temperature sensors means you’ll know right away if heat rate losses are affecting your efficiency — not days or weeks after something goes wrong.
Replace time-based maintenance with as-needed maintenance.
Prioritize, Plan, Prevent
Continuous remote monitoring, supported by AI-driven root cause analysis, means that you can prioritize maintenance activities based on criticality instead of taking machines out of service based on a best guess. SMARTdiagnostics will help you determine whether your asset issues need immediate attention or if they can wait for a better maintenance window.
In some cases, damaging operations detected by SMARTdiagnostics can even be corrected without taking equipment offline, preventing lock-out/tag-outs and loss of revenue.
Prioritize maintenance activities based on criticality instead of best guesses.
KCF Technologies Gives Utilities Facilities a Competitive Edge
Gain access to continuous monitoring and a team of engineers with a wealth of utilities industry experience in asset health monitoring, root cause analysis, and problem-solving.
Our machine health optimization platform was designed for manufacturers with tough asset challenges that traditional monitoring can’t solve. We’ll help you prevent unplanned downtime and increase productivity, efficiency, and revenue.
