Extended downtime recently became a distinct possibility at a North American customer’s nuclear power plant when FieldCore’s outage team discovered a generator leak during testing. A repair was required before the site could restart operation. Based on the limited accessibility to the leak, the customer was looking at extending their outage about a week … bad news for a critical electricity provider to a major city.
FieldCore Generator Specialist Mike Loveless partnered with the outage team on a solution involving a welding method called TIG brazing. This process uses brass or bronze material to weld an area together, or in this case, seal the generator connection ring leak. This method, however, isn’t a commonly used process since it typically requires easy, unobstructed access to the surface area of the connection rings. Fortunately for our customer, this obstacle hardly sidetracked the dedicated team.
They came up with an out-of-the-box idea to weld the leak in a spiral pattern that could be done in the tight space they had to work with. After getting the customer’s and GE design engineers’ nod to move forward with the repair, Mike and the outage team did so with success. In the process, they saved the site a full week of extra outage time. Not only that, the customer was so happy with the repair that they now consider it a best practice to be used at other nuclear facilities in their fleet.
This expertise, creative thinking and partnership with GE engineering is a great example of the capabilities FieldCore brings to our customers.
