Mobilization

 "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." - Voltaire

Unfortunately this year at work, I've been much more deeply involved in planning the annual outage than would have been the case had I remained on shift work.  A mixed bag, this job.  LOL.

This week it's beginning to come together though.  

General Electric's temporary office trailers arrived, along with the porta potties.

Scaffolding and a high-lift machine arrived, along with a trailer to store the steam turbine lube oil.

The steam turbine rotor stands arrived.

Tradies began laying down plywood on the catwalk deck.  The entire area will be covered.  This is the area where a lot of the steam turbine repair work will be done.  They call it "bolt world" - where the casing bolts get refurbished and ready for re-installation.  Also the steam turbine diaprhagms - if they are not damaged - will be cleaned and prepared to be re-installed.

Cargo containers full of tools and consumables arrived on flat-beds and were hoisted onto the upper deck with the overhead crane.  Lots of cribbing on hand to set the heavy parts down onto.

 Below:  Setting another tooling container down on the other side of the steam turbine.

 The building will be lifted off the steam turbine.  The sheet metal slot underneath the steam line has already been removed so that the building can be lifted upwards.

Below:  Generator rotor skids.  When the generator rotor is pulled out (or installed) of the machine, it slides out the back end on these curved plates, so as to avoid damaging either the rotor or the stator.

 

Below:  Instrumentation to replace stuff that's failed on the steam turbine, and to install in the new bearings.

We also have a computer relocation project ongoing.  All the critical plant control computers are being moved to a new lockable and cooled cabinet.  They are already of course fire-walled or air-gapped from the internet, but the added physical security will be welcome.

The generator will be rewound this outage, with the rotor going offsite to the manufacturer's facility.  However the stator rewind will be done onsite.  The stator conductors were shipped from Spain earlier this month, and should be arriving this weekend.  They are bare copper metal and have to be insulated on site.  The oven for baking the polymer insulation requires three phase power at 400 Amps at 480 volts!!!  That's 330 kilowatts - quite the oven.  Below are the temporary leads just for that one oven.

We also had to provide power for inductive heaters for the steam turbine bolting, for steam turbine rotor sandblasting, for rotor turning motors once the rotor is on the stand, and a few other items.  For this we uncoupled some of the building heaters and connected temporary power leads to them.

Below:  Our homemade mobile power distribution box.  It hooks to a 480 volt welding receptacle and can then power quite a lot of tooling.

Below:  The clarifier is out of service already and is being de-watered.  The bathtub toys were saved first.

And because the generator is being taken apart, we cannot rely on standard outage clearances.  Those don't adequately address all the sources of electricity that are within the generator, so it's necessary to do a bit more research.

The waste water treatment part of the plant is already shut down, so the waste water cooling tower has now been drained so the basin can be cleaned out.  Nasty.  Below is the pump suction sump.

Below:  This cooling tower receives the blowdown from the main cooling tower, and evaporates as much water as possible - this is part of the process of returning as much water as possible to the plant, and only discharging bins of salt waste.  However it's a tedious process that requires a lot of manpower.  The salt has to be washed down into the basin a couple of times a year.  This is what is left after washing!

On a personal note, since the heavy snow has stopped falling and the county has stopped spraying chloride-based ice melt on the road, I've busted out the V-12 powered mafia boss car.

And good news on the old truck front!  I've now got an engine stand.  I need to assemble the thing, but at least it's here.  I can rent an engine hoist for fifty bucks and get the engine and transmission out.  The transmission will go off for freshening up by someone who knows what they are doing.  The engine I can deal with myself.  

Speaking of the engine, I also recently ordered some stuff to upgrade from the old points-tyle distributor - a GM-style HEI type.  Hot spark, magnetic trigger, no maintenance.

Definitely an upgrade from this.  Remember the days of adjusting point gaps and setting the dwell angle and adjusting the timing afterwards?  Yeah, I'd rather forget those days as well.