MiniLab™ 153 Enters Nuclear Power Plants

he MiniLab Series is rapidly being adopted by nuclear power plants in China and worldwide to provide on-site oil analysis, avoiding unplanned failures and preventing costly downtime. Sending samples to outside laboratories can be particularly expensive for nuclear power plants, as many outside laboratories are not equipped to handle radioactive samples and those that can often charge high rates for doing so. In an industry as critical as nuclear power, the turnaround time associated with off-site labs is often too long.

The MiniLab™ 153 solves these problems. In about twenty minutes the MiniLab runs four simple tests to give the operator a comprehensive view of machinery health at your site. There is no need to send samples to an outside laboratory. The SpectrOil 100 Series optical emission spectrometer provides valuable insight into elemental contamination of lubrication oil, fuel and water. The MiniLab also provides rapid, automated particle counting and classification using the proprietary LaserNetFines® technology. The LaserNet 200 Series can also count and sort ferrous wear particles by size. Finally, the MiniLab provides insight into oil condition with a portable viscometer and IR analyzer. The IR analyzer provides information on key parameters like water contamination, TAN and oxidation.

The Chinese market is seeing a rapid adoption of nuclear power, and reliability professionals at these plants are embracing oil analysis and the MiniLab Series. Currently China has 34 nuclear power plants generating 8 GW of electricity, which represents just under 3% of the power generating capacity in the country. However, they have aggressive goals with 20 new plants under construction and 42 more planned. By 2020 China plans to produce 58 GW of nuclear power.

On March 10, 2017 Spectro Scientific (Beijing) hosted a Nuclear Power Industrial seminar in Haiyan China. More than 60 nuclear power plant customers and government representatives attended the seminar. The Shanghai Nuclear Society and the Zhejiang Haiyan Association Nuclear Power Branch co-hosted the event, in which local speakers revealed development trends in oil analysis technologies in Chinese nuclear power facilities. In addition, users of Spectro Scientific’s Minilab 53 described the applications and benefits of fluid analysis.

One nuclear plant has been analyzing samples from 35 critical pieces of equipment since December 2016. In that time they have been able to identify a total of 14 lubrication and equipment problems. In one case, water contamination of one oil sample was over 1500 ppm. Using oil analysis they were able to spot this problem early and track the source to a faulty seal, which was replaced. In another case, the oil in one critical system did not match the specifications for that oil found in the FluidScan database. Samples of this oil also showed high levels of wear particles. It was determined that the wrong lubrication oil had been used in this piece of equipment. Early detection avoided potential equipment failure and costly downtime.

Alex Shi, Managing Director of Spectro Scientific China, gave a presentation introducing new products such as the SpectrOil Version 8, FerroCheck 2000 and FluidScan Version 5, to the Chinese nuclear power market. Linda Shi followed this with a presentation about the MiniLab 153, a comprehensive oil analyzer for industrial and power generation machinery.

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