New Rolls-Royce Solutions for Remote Management of Power Plants

Rolls-Royce is developing several new digital solutions that will revolutionize the way its customers manage their power plants with medium speed Bergen engines. One of these is the new Rolls-Royce Equipment Monitoring concept; a generic end-to-end platform for secure collection, transfer, storage, and analysis of engine data.

“We believe that our customers should be able to manage their power plant equipment from anywhere in the world. Our Remote Monitoring concept is an example of how we are getting closer to that reality, where our customers can get insight to vital information in real-time,” said Rob Borneman, Head of Service Agreements and Sales in Bergen Engines, part of Rolls-Royce Power Systems.

More and more power plants across the world are going online with the new Rolls-Royce remote monitoring tool, which has been operational for testing for more than a year. By detecting anomalies on mission critical components at an earlier stage, it gives power plant operators the ability to avoid unnecessary downtime and reduce costs.

If the plant operators need technical support, they have access to first-hand advice from Rolls-Royce specialist engineers who further analyse the data. Furthermore, if the customer activates RemoteAccess, the service team can remotely change operational parameters, fine-tune the engine and optimise its performance. This will not only ensure faster troubleshooting and reduced downtime, but also reduce costs for the plant operator by not having to send a service engineer to the site.

“Following this, the next step is to detect and address problems before they occur. Large data sets from power plants are already being analysed using machine learning, and lessons learned will be deployed to improve the plant’s performance and reduce further downtime,” Rob commented.

Rolls-Royce is also investing in Virtual Reality. In the coming years, customers and Rolls-Royce technical support teams will be able to meet in a virtual control room from anywhere in the world. The first Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality prototype has been developed, showing their medium speed engines’ digital twins in real time.