Gaurav Kumar
Industrial steam turbine expert
Gaurav Kumar has more than 25 years of experience. After starting his career with Siemens Industrial Solution and Services, he moved to Siemens Mobility Infrastructure for Turnkey projects and other challenging assignments of electrification. At Siemens Energy, he brings an experience of providing end to end electrical and automation solutions, for industry and infrastructure.
Over the years, due to aging of equipment, the performance decreases significantly. With new equipment and modernization measures, operators could get around 7 to 10 % more power output.Gaurav Kumar, Expert Industrial Steam Turbines
Why do plant operators decide for brownfield projects and modernizations?
Key driver for brownfield projects and modernizations of the equipment is rising fuel price. Customers want to lower down their OPEX cost by extracting more energy with same quantity of fuel. Due to aging of equipment, performance decreases significantly. Our new equipment with latest technology offers best efficiency. As a result, customers are achieving around 7 to 10 % more power output
What is challenging in a brownfield project?
One of the main challenges is to understand an existing infrastructure at the customer site, which at times impact our engineering efforts to a great extent. In addition to this, after being awarded the project, we have a challenge to complete all the installation work, within the limited time of plant shut down. Our Siemens Energy Industrial Steam Turbines team is very well positioned to meet any of these challenges. We have large technical know-how gathered from our longstanding experience of working, on various design platforms. Moreover, we have very competent Engineering and R&D teams, who help us to understand customer problems and offer reliable, efficient, and most innovative solutions.
What are good examples of improvement or enhancements in a brownfield project?
In a brownfield project, we can enhance the power output and improve the fuel consumption. In addition to this, startup times can become shorter and wide variations of process steam flow can be accommodated. Also, electric load fluctuations, the governing-control-protection system, and the major or minor overhaul time intervals can be improved.