Voith Hydro Extends Diagnostic Services Portfolio and Introduces New Product Family

With its Digital Health Assessments, Voith Hydro provides reports and recommendations for condition-based maintenance activities of the power station, based on an intelligent analysis of the existing plant data. Since their introduction to the market two years ago, Voith Hydro’s Diagnostic Services offering has been continuously developed and revised. These optimizations lead to considerable improvements in quality and added value of diagnostic services in general.

In addition to general enhancements of the information provided by the Digital Health Assessments, the malfunction values that indicate anomalies in the power plant have been expanded. This has led to an increase in efficiency in the provision of analysis results, so that more than 60 so-called Health Status Indicators are evaluated. In the future, diagnostic services will be further expanded to include automatic, digital condition assessments of plants.

In parallel to the product optimization of the existing solution, Voith Hydro is also working on expanding its portfolio in the field of Diagnostic Services and is now creating the new OnCare.Diagnostic product family.

Under this umbrella, the optimized version of the Digital Health Assessments will become OnCare.Diagnostic Professional. It includes the already established reports that are supplemented by professional consultancy through targeted support from Voith Hydro experts – in the OnPerformance.Lab in Heidenheim, Germany. In this way, the analysis results and detected anomalies are directly linked to the associated risks and professional recommendations in order to enable precise planning of maintenance work and prevent unplanned shutdowns.

Another solution, which is still under development, is to be added to the product family in the course of the year. The OnCare.Diagnostic Base solution will enable automatic malfunction diagnostics and provide recommendations for maintenance activities as a software-as-a-service. These are designed to be uncomplicated and time-saving.

Successful application at Landsvirkjun
Icelandic utility Landsvirkjun has been using OnCare.Diagnostic Professional at the Budarhals power station, in the south of Iceland, for one and a half years.

In the course of Budarhals’ annual inspection in April 2022, the reports of OnCare.Diagnostic Professional and the input from OnPerformance.Lab experts in Heidenheim were considered. During the startup of the unit right after the inspection, a malfunction was detected in the automation of a machine unit, so that the unit could only be controlled manually in emergency mode. Within less than 24 hours, the root cause was identified by the OnPerformance.Lab and Voith Hydro Automation team, together with Landsvirkjun, and could be solved within only a few days. The immediate support from Voith Hydro helped the customer bring the unit back to optimal condition and keep downtimes to a minimum.

Landsvirkjun expressed its satisfaction with the early extension of the contract for another two years through June 2024.

"The empathetic letter of thanks from the customer after successful problem solving confirms our approach of flexible, efficient and effective remote support," explains Dr. Alexander Jung, Head of Digital Hydro Solutions at Voith Hydro. "We are pleased that we could convince with our competence and problem-solving orientation and now look forward to an even more intensive cooperation," he continues.