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BlackShadow posted:I get email notifications from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau on safety-related incidents for rail, air and sea incidents. Most of the time it's some chucklefuck who can't load a plane properly or a railway safeworking incident in the middle of nowhere, but every so often there's a gem like this one. I happen to be on a similar mailing list, but mine is for the worldwide electric power industry. Your failed turbine reminded me of these pictures, which I got several years ago.   This is from a fossil plant, which means I can post it here without getting fired. If you work in the industry, you've probably seen this before; it's the eight million dollar roll of paper towels picture that FME coordinators everywhere love. That's a 500 MW gas turbine from a plant in Texas. Operators entered the turbine housing during an outage to clean the inlet guide vanes. Upon their exit, they left their paper towels inside the inlet mouth. This resulted in a partially blocked inlet, and thus a low pressure zone inside the turbine. 23 hours later, they had what you see above.
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Jul 23, 2011 07:43
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Cakefool posted:So the paper towels sat against the igv's as it started to spin, remained lodged creating a local low pressure zone behind a handful of vanes, causing enough imbalance/turbulence to lunch the entire rig. Have I got that right? That's my understanding of the event. I live in steam turbine land, but any turbine in which the blades pass through a pressure differential is going to shake itself apart eventually. The truly  part for me is that they ran for 23 hours like that. I know things are different at gas burners, but I'd like to think we would have been tripped on high vibes an awful long time before there were blades lodged in a wall.
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Jul 23, 2011 13:53
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Sponge! posted:I like to think that someone would have gone down the list and asked where the paper towels are during the equipment check at the end. I know drat well you make sure every single thing you took in needs to come back out, except for spit/sweat. I'll let those two slide. Yeah, that too. We had a "re-engagement" on the importance of foreign material exclusion logging two outages ago, when a plastic cap for excluding foreign material got lodged inside a thrust bearing and delayed start-up by close to two weeks. The irony of the FME cap becoming an FME hazard was lost on no-one. If you work out the cost of an outage extension, that FME cap actually cost us more than the Texan paper towels, but the pictures aren't nearly as interesting. Also, posting them could get me fired.
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Jul 23, 2011 14:31
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Three-Phase posted:Wooooooooow! I've gotta show the people at work this. You lost a 500MW turbine? Unbelievable. Well, to be accurate, I didn't personally lose it, it was some guys at a CC plant in Texas. The turbines in the megawatt factory where I am employed don't have compressors, and if one of them shook itself apart I wouldn't be posting pictures here because I don't want to be fired.
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Jul 24, 2011 10:13
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KozmoNaut posted:All this talk of horrible sulphur and flouride compounds, and yet sulphur hexaflouride is inert and completely harmless. Hell, think about how dangerous "sodium chloride" sounds for a second. Speaking as someone who has a disciplinary action in my employee file that says, essentially, "stop labeling bottles as "dihydrogen monoxide" and leaving them places where inter-departmental auditors can see them", I can attest that otherwise-educated people will freak the gently caress out over chemical names. As far as SF6 being harmless, I wish someone had told the EPA and the NRC before they made us both replace all of our gas-insulated switchgear and promise to never, ever use SF6 as a tracer gas for air inleakage ever again.
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Sep 20, 2011 15:17
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Godholio posted:Whatever the typical spray brake cleaner is, it'll make the typical blue nitrile gloves go all pruny, then they just fall apart under the slightest pressure. Kleen-All solvent does the same thing. Silvershields work quite nicely. Until you get one with a giant crease in it, and the point at the end of the crease slices you open from the middle of your palm to halfway down your forearm.
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Sep 20, 2011 21:03
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