USER SUCCESS STORY
How performance engineers at a utility company efficiently optimized start-up and ramp-up operations.
Performance engineers reduced the analysis effort by a factor of 10
Benefits
Highlights
Visplore’s intuitive capabilities for extracting and analyzing start-up and ramp-up operations were a key factor in our engineers’ ability to improve the performance of our plants. – Performance Engineering Expert, Utility Company
Challenge: Tedious analysis of critical start-up operations
A utility company facing substantial volatility in the power grid, which necessitated more frequent and rapid cycling of their thermal power plants’ output. Optimizing start-up procedures is inherently complex, traditionally relying on the experience and intuition of individual operators.
The existing process for analyzing start-up operations was time-consuming and tedious, involving manual data extraction and comparison using tools like Excel. This task required in-depth knowledge of critical parameters, which meant it could not be automated or easily outsourced to data scientists.
The company needed a solution that enabled performance engineers to quickly and effectively analyze and optimize these operations.
Solution: Intuitive extraction, analysis and standardization
Visplore provided an advanced data processing tool that revolutionized the analysis of start-up and ramp-up operations for the utility company’s performance engineers.
With Visplore, engineers could:
- Quickly & reliably extract relevant data from the process information system
- Efficiently display & compare operations across multiple sensors using interactive tools
- Intuitively calculate & analyze KPIs such as fuel consumption, duration of load changes, and ramp rates
- Save their analysis as a standard template for regular application to new data
This intuitive and interactive approach enabled engineers to independently optimize start-up procedures without requiring extensive manual effort or deep technical knowledge in data science.
Result: Better plant performance and massively reduced analysis effort
The comprehensive analysis of start-up, ramp-up and down operations in Visplore enabled the performance engineers to optimize the instructions that can be provided for the operators. Without jeopardizing equipment integrity, start-up operations could be accelerated this way by about 30 minutes and fuel consumption for start-ups and ramp-ups could be reduced by 20% on average.
Compared to their previous workflows using Excel, the effort for data analysis was reduced by a factor of 10. In addition, this interactive visual approach to data analysis significantly expanded the understanding of the process.
