Top Innovators
Portland General Electric won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2024 award ''Bertha Lamme Top Innovator for Generation'' for its Steam Casing Leak Repair.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Describe this innovation and its impact.
Austin Curtis: The last thing you want to hear as a plant manager is you've got a significant crack in your steam case. When it's extended beyond over half the thickness of the case, that gets even more concerning.
Typically, for a repair, you have to do quite an extraction of the crack, or cracks, and a significant heat treatment associated with that. There're a lot of risks involved. When the team started discussing a controlled deposition process, it was an easy decision to make.
Knowing I have the experts in the room, the welding experts, the non-destructive testing experts, it makes for an easy decision to get the plant back and run it reliably for the customers of PGE. They tested it, made proof of concept, and executed. That was all I needed to know I made the right decision moving forward.
PUF: Chris and Andrew, why was this important? What was involved?
Chris Bier: It was important as that crack was a little over two inches deep, so that's a lot of weld metal to put back in. The residual stresses would be so high that the two cracks, two inches deep, would've ripped itself apart, had we not done a heat treatment on it.