Turbine Technology Services Corporation (TTS), a US full-service gas turbine engineering services firm based in Orlando, Florida, has designed a solution to offer triple modular redundancy (TMR) for gas turbine control applications. This solution leverages control technology from Rockwell Automation, a provider of automation controls and information solutions based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Over the past decade the central Florida-based gas turbine engineering company has worked on numerous projects in regions such as North and South America, Asia, and Africa. Ageing power plants and gas compressor stations in these locations often require upgrade and modernization services to extend their operational lifetime in order to reduce outages and decrease downtime.
Core to the TMR gas turbine solution is a Rockwell Automation Trusted TMR controller designed to provide enhanced safety and availability for power generation and gas compression applications. The controller incorporates a fault-tolerant architecture to help eliminate spurious system trips. It also provides high availability as part of its inherent safety-related functionality.
The Trusted TMR design uses a majority voting process to identify the source of a fault. Random hardware failures will cause one of three process control ‘slices’ to react differently to the others. This discrepancy can then be captured and reported by the voting system. The Trusted TMR system reacts immediately to control-system faults, helping meet the user’s safety integrity requirements.
"We are truly honoured to be working with Rockwell Automation to implement the Trusted TMR solution for gas turbine applications," said Tony Thornton, president of Turbine Technology Services. "We see this association as a win-win for both companies as we seek to further enhance our respective product offerings and solutions to the gas turbine marketplace. Also, the timing of this new initiative is significant given the number of GE ‘F’ class gas turbines that are fast approaching a need for TMR control system retrofits.
"The Trusted TMR solution is ideal for gas turbine applications in the power generation and gas compression industries," said Eric Fidler, director of Global Oil and Gas Sales for Rockwell Automation. "TTS is delivering a leading-edge solution for customers seeking high availability in their turbine applications."