Rotating Equipment Upgrades: Giving Existing Assets a Second Life

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Turbomachinery, like any other industrial equipment, starts to degrade with age. Spare parts, expertise, and support become harder to find and come at a high price. Declining performance leads to problems with reliability, resulting in downtime and unplanned outages, inefficiencies, potential safety risks, and of course increased costs and reduced revenues. Companies are then faced with a choice of complete and expensive replacement of their turbomachinery, or an upgrade of the problematic systems. By modernizing their control and auxiliary systems, companies can achieve much better performance and extend the life of these critical assets many years without an expensive OEM replacement.

Modernization:

The computing power and applications available today exceed what may have been the best in class 20 years ago. Modern controllers can offer better control of your system and provide better information to your operators. Additionally, with new applications, system information doesn’t need to stay at the operator level but can instead feed into reliability and performance applications, allowing companies to improve performance and predict maintenance needs before they become a problem. Remote connectivity can simplify access to date and allows SMEs to support instantly from anywhere in the world. Simulators and digital twins now offer reliable models that can help with engineering and process changes, optimization and operator training. With expertise leaving the workforce as systems age, training a new generation of operators to handle rare but important scenarios is critically important.

Emissions:

The growing pressure on our industry to monitor and reduce emissions can be helped with several approaches. At the most basic level, reductions of unplanned outages can reduce consequential emissions. As well, utility power upgrade and electrification of systems, Power Gas to Pneumatic or Electric conversions, and integration of third part or OEM solutions including custom designed starters, can reduce methane emissions. Dry seal gas recompression can help adhere to new and future regulations. Better reliability reduces the need for responses like flaring, which can in turn reduce emissions including NOx. Digital solutions layer on this and can collect and deliver information to management systems giving visibility to these reductions.

Safety:

Aging equipment, unplanned outages, unexpected maintenance, and lack of training can all add to safety risks. A modernized system that integrates solutions to increase reliability, monitor performance, and predict maintenance allows for a more proactive and less rushed approach to turbomachinery operations. Additionally, solutions like digital twins and simulators can provide operators and maintenance teams with the training to handle unexpected or rare situations, however impactful. All of these result in potentially significant risk reductions and improvements to safety.

Other Systems:

Improvements to rotating equipment are not limited to control system upgrades. Auxiliary system retrofits, including starters, lube oil systems, inlet air systems, exhaust systems, fuel trains, cooling, and other systems can be critical to efficient rotating equipment operations. Retrofits and new installations require integration with existing plant electrical, mechanical, and control systems, which can also offer substantial operational and financial benefits to companies.

Tarco had its genesis in the upgrades of rotating equipment and turbomachinery controls, auxiliary systems, and balance of plant engineering, and it has been delivering cost effective solutions for almost 28 years. Either working with OEM partners or independently leveraging standard industry technology, Tarco has supported customers with thousands of projects across a broad variety of equipment. Our motiv® products and solutions embed this extensive knowledge by optimizing execution capabilities with tools and applications that save time and money, yet still allow the flexibility to address customer specific requirements.

Visit us at www.tarco.com or contact us at [email protected] for more information.