Success Story: Detecting a default valve in a hydropower station

Background

Hydropower generators are big machines that can be placed in remote locations. These machines operate for several years. Therefore, older ones do not have a proper monitoring system to keep track of their health. These machines are however running on marked-driven schedules,and stopping them, even for a relatively short period of time, is costly.

This makes the installation of invasive sensors very expensive. On the other hand, a monitoring system can help increase the lifetime of the machine and also detect malfunctioning parts before they totally break down which, apart from the cost of the repair itself, would produce an interruption of the energy supply that can cost large amounts of money in terms of loss of revenue.

Solution

To monitor the machines we installed a microphone close to the machine connected to an edge device with our Resonyx software. The operation is non-invasive and does not require any interruption of production. Once installed, the system continuously monitored the sound the machine was producing and analyzed its properties. On top of that, snippets of audio were also periodically recorded and all data stored in a cloud. 

To make an example of the potentiality of audio monitoring, our systems deployed in a hydroelectric station detected a change in behavior of the loudness of the sound. After further inspection, our analysts concluded that a certain event made the characteristics of the sound change. This was sent to the generator experts together with audio files from before and after this event. After inspecting those, they concluded that some action was needed and they finally found out that a valve was malfunctioning and needed to be repaired. This was detected remotely, without having to wait for a person to actually visit the station and check the machine, which allowed for a much faster intervention, protecting other components of the machine from a long term exposure to the failing one.

Value

The Resonyx software is a solution to monitor machinery in a completely non-invasive way. With our installation on hydropower generators we provided a way to keep track of their health in a continuous and remote way.

A clear example of its usefulness is the example described above: our system could fastly detect a failure in one of the components of the machine, which could avoid more severe problems, which in turn would have implied more costly repairs. Our system, therefore, contributes to extending the lifetime of the machines it is applied at.