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Alta Solutions: Combustion Dynamics Monitoring System (CDMS)

In recent years, environmental regulations have forced power generation plants to lower NOx emissions by burning a leaner flame in the combustor. As a result, many sites have experienced combustor pulsations that amplify as they move through the turbine. This pressure amplification produces significant vibration that can damage the turbine package.

In order to avoid or minimize the amount of damage to the turbine and peripheral components, it is essential to quickly detect the presence of these combustor pulsations and to alter the combustion process such as changing fuel splits.

AS-250 SpectralMon™ and AS-330R CombustionGuard™ protect your turbine from damage caused by combustion dynamics or pulsations.

The AS-250 SpectralMon provides advanced real-time monitoring and analysis with a powerful set of alarming criteria to detect changes in the dynamic signature of your critical machinery or process.

Once a dynamic event is detected, the system instantly informs the control system or other external devices and acts as a digital recorder by capturing important data before and after the event. This information can be used to alert the operator to change process settings or schedule maintenance.

The AS-330R CombustionGuard system is a product of over a decade of operational experience monitoring combustion dynamics in gas turbine engines. The system brings sophisticated monitoring algorithms, multiple control outputs, and instrument-grade signal processing to a robust embedded platform that is highly configurable, yet easy to maintain. Alta Solutions CDMS systems have logged over 10 million operational hours and the lessons learned through the deployment of these systems have been incorporated in the AS-330R CombustionGuard.

Benefits of the CDMS include early detection of combustor pulsations, reduce the severity of combustor pulsations, informing the DCS and operator of combustor events, track and correlate the history of pulsation events, simultaneous monitoring of all combustors, and storage of dynamic pressure data of events for post-processing.

Applications for the CDMS are steam and gas turbine monitoring, centrifugal and reciprocating compressor monitoring, cooling tower fan monitoring, wind turbine monitoring, cold rolling mill monitoring, pulp and paper mill monitoring, textile mill monitoring, and roll grinder monitoring.