GE and TCS collaborate to reduce gas turbine manufacturing cost

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and GE have developed technology that will revolutionise gas turbine manufacturing with smart LEDs and GE’s Predix operating system. TCS has developed a digital solution to connect intelligent LEDs to GE’s Predix operating system for the industrial Internet through Intel Atom-based gateways, providing critical analytics to save significant time and costs in the manufacturing process.

The digital solution will analyse temperature at various points on the metal turbine parts as they are assembled and cooled, allowing operators to know when the next operation can be performed, reducing wait time between operations and improving quality monitoring. The pilot application was built and deployed for GE Power’s gas turbine manufacturing plant in Greenville, South Carolina (USA).

During the turbine manufacturing process, rotor stacking is a key process and needs extremely high levels of precision. If the rotor wheels are stacked incorrectly due to differences in the surface temperature, it will require reassembly, incurring heavy additional costs and two to three weeks of shipment delays.

TCS’ new digital solution provides automatic data collection of ambient room and rotor surface temperatures, measuring for unacceptable variations, notifying workers when the next operation may proceed, and alerting workers to any non-uniformity. This application is built on the intelligent LED platform by GE and Intel that can reduce costs and energy consumption and provide data collection and analytics capabilities. This platform is composed of smart LED fixtures from Current, powered by GE, integrated with sensors that monitor temperature, humidity and any physical object presence, transmitting the data to an Intel Atom-based gateway where the information is streamed to the Predix cloud.

“The TCS solution will enable significant cost and time savings in the rotor stacking process - and is one example of what can be built on the Predix platform. This demonstrates the power of three industry leaders leveraging their respective best-in-class capabilities to transform the manufacturing industry,” said Denzil Samuels, head, global channels and alliances, GE Digital.

Anupam Singhal, vice president, Tata Consultancy Services, added, “TCS teaming up with GE and Intel on this innovative solution will deliver the benefits of industrial IoT in bringing certainty in complex manufacturing operations. This will also be a valuable addition to TCS Digital Store and GE’s Predix ecosystem.”

As part of the GE Digital Alliance Program, TCS has made significant investments in scaling its Predix practice, having more than 550 of a planned 1,000 consultants already trained with hands-on execution experience across designing, architecting and conceptualising solutions on the Predix platform.