Remote Health Monitoring

Guest post by Andrea Szabóné Mészáros, Plant Leader at GE Energy Measurement & Control

In the same way that patients can be remotely monitored nowadays, industrial equipment can also benefit from this technology. This is what GE Measurement & Control business is doing at its newest remote condition monitoring center in Fót, Hungary. The center services customers from the United Kingdom to China and from the Central Europe region to Russia and east to Sakhalin Island. The machines that are being monitored are mainly critical assets such as steam and gas turbines, generators, compressors, pumps and extruders in petrochemical and power generation plants and in different oil & gas platforms.

Attila Kiss, Senior Machinery Diagnostic Engineer in the Hungarian remote monitoring center

Measurement & Control, part of GE Oil & Gas business, delivers healthcare for industrial machines, improving the health and productivity of their customers’ most critical assets through the application of smart, differentiated and integrated technology.

Just as with patients, hours and minutes can make the difference between saving an industrial machine or facing an issue or even a potential crisis. An unexpected stop, alteration or disruption of a wide range of equipment could cause significant problems not only for the plant in question, but for its associated environment as well. With condition monitoring the stop and break of some critical machines can be prevented which means that outages and accidents can be avoided. With early detection of the potential failures the operator of the plant will have enough time to prepare for an outage and the reparation can be enrolled in time.

That’s why remote monitoring of industrial assets is becoming more and more important. GE’s Hungarian center connects with a global network allowing 24/7 access to real time service expertise; this means access to the most skilled engineers at any time in Europe and around the globe.

Thanks to technical innovation GE Measurement & Control has overcome the speed and security limitations that once made remote access impractical. So today GE’s experts can continuously gather customer data on specific metrics, perform machine oversight, detect trends and approaching issues and provide troubleshooting support.  In short they can provide early diagnosis and prevent damage to critical industrial assets.