Do you have a set of plans? We may need one soon for our neighborhood.
That unit there the GE Frame 5 came out of Hickham Industries in Texas.
They were super rugged and installed all over the world as stand alone power generation units.
That unit would burn pulverized coal, natural gas, distillate, bunker oil number 6 if you could get it down her throat and light it off she would go.
On that rebuild, the project manager who knew e and my history called me to come and sit in on the project planning.
He wanted my opinion.
I came to the site and got permission to try and fire the unit and see and hear it run.
It kept tripping off on vibration alarms.
So I watched it run, an felt how she acted.
The flame was unstable and orange. Should have been blue/white and strong stable burn on NatGas.
You need a lot of data to analyze these things.
Even the atmospheric density comes into play as the 16 stage compressor and air flows can not be changed.
Meeting begins. All the local guru's are trying to jump higher than their own penis's.
I let them jump and make notes.
Finally the project manager says to me.
You have made no comments.
I said well I have been busy taking notes.
He said what do you think is wrong and how much money do you think I should budget to fix this thing.
I said I don't see a reason yet to tear it down, although the secondary gear box between the output and the generator probably could use an alignment check.
What you really need is a GE Combustion Engineer to do a fuel air balance and stabilize the combustion.
I said people think these units are like a steam turbine, but they are not. Think of them more like an old hot rod with too rich of a fuel mixture running with the choke on. You are running her too rich. and have to lean out the fuel.
I offended everyone. I said you asked. So budget for a Technician to come to site, or failing that give me your best E&I Tech on staff and some money for long distance phone calls.
They lost there shit.
We tore it all down an found nothing. The alignment check found minor misalignment as I suspected.
So we did the follow up meeting. They test ran her and she kept tripping.
So last meeting I said when can I have the Combustion Engineer.
We got the E&I tech in the meeting. we got GE on the phone. They talk.
Holy shit old man was right. When GE got the numbers from control valve inputs they had to be dialed back major. Reduce fuel and she took off like a big ol bird.
After being laughed at for offering such a low cost solution, it was great rubbing their noses in my shit.