Marubeni Power Eyes Refined Maintenance Approach for Smithfield Cogeneration Plant in Australia

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Perth, Australia)--Marubeni Power Development Australia's (New South Wales, Australia) Smithfield Energy Facility is a 160-megawatt (MW) Combined-Cycle Cogeneration Plant situated in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The power plant is considered a world-class power plant providing electricity and steam to customers in New South Wales.

Marubeni Power Development Australia, previously known as Sithe Energies is a subsidiary of Marubeni Corporation (Japan, Tokyo), is involved in the handling of products and provision of services in a broad range of sectors.

Marubeni Australia is currently working with Mainpac Pty Limited (New South Wales, Australia) to provide better visibility of the plant's existing assets in a view to drive down the costs and reduce time involved in managing the plant's assets. In accordance with the agreement, Marubeni will use the Mainpac 2011 Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software that will provide the plant engineers and maintenance managers with the basic asset records including details on spare parts, allowing the company to have a better view of the assets condition. This will ultimately help the company to generate predictive and preventive maintenance work.

According to Michael Heazlewood, Marubeni's plant manager, the company intends to cut down the maintenance costs and perform condition based maintenance on their assets. Michael also mentioned about conducting some upgrades and refurbishments on the units in future to increase the regular overhaul interval to six or nine years.

"We chose Mainpac because the team was very responsive and available and we were able to sit down with them to talk about what we needed, then customise the system accordingly," Michael said.

Smithfield site consists of three combustion turbines with associated heat recovery steam generators, which produces a combined electricity of 100 MW. The 60-MW steam turbine is fuelled by waste heat that is produced from the combustion turbine.

Marubeni has planned for a scheduled maintenance on the 60-MW GE steam turbine at the plant end of this year. The major maintenance outage will involve inspection and repairs to several equipments including turbine and generator. Combustion turbines undergo minor routine inspections every year for approximately 7 days.

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