We held a “lunch & learn” event last week.
It was hosted by a major operator, and designed for us to share some of the experiences we’ve gone through over the last 30 years.
Over those 30 years, we’ve helped to maintain a lot of critical diesel engines, so the experiences shared were designed to help engineers identify, prevent and rectify any problems that affect the safety, reliability and performance of their equipment.
During the day, we showed borescope pictures and talked through the engine issues that could be highlighted by using one, and during that session, one of the Reliability Engineers shared a concern.
The problem that he was facing was the lack of information that he and his team had, as a result of their common maintenance process.
For main generation, they have 4 diesel driven sets. 3 are onboard at any one time, and the fourth is a swing set.
(If you’re not sure of the swing set model, here is an article I wrote about it last year.)
Generally speaking, swing set programmes can work well – lots of our customers use them as they reduce the downtime during major overhauls.
NB this isn’t the engine the reliability engineer was referring to, but an example of an
MTU exchange engine being installed.
However, there can be drawbacks.
With this particular engine, although the swing set reduced downtime, they may have been incurring unnecessary costs as a result.
You see, because the engines were being swapped by exchange units at the engine manufacturer, they had no visibility on how much wear had occurred, or what internal damage there was.
This information is vital to know if there are other problems in how the package is being run, or if the maintenance schedules can be extended.
If this is a problem you’ve experienced, it’s worth exploring a different option:
Have the removed engine overhauled, so a full analysis of the condition can be conducted, rather than just swapping the engine out for another overhauled engine from an unknown source.
If you want to chat about it in any more detail, just let me know.
P.S. If you would be interested in us carrying out a lunch and learn event with your engineering team, contact us and we’ll set it up.
