OREANDA-NEWS. Rolls-Royce has signed a four-year contract to provide US nuclear utility operator, PSEG, with its innovative digital analytics service to help drive greater plant efficiency.

The four-year contract will see the deployment of Rolls-Royce’s T-104 service focus on efficiency savings and optimized maintenance activities at PSEG’s two nuclear power plants at Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Power Plants in New Jersey, USA. It follows a successful six-month pilot scheme which showed 40% of planned maintenance activities that were included in the trial, did not need to be conducted as regularly as currently scheduled.

The T-104 service uses worldwide nuclear power plant operating data to provide best-in-class asset management services. This enables Rolls-Royce to convert that intelligence into valuable insights to help PSEG maximize plant availability and reliability by allowing them to focus on the right equipment, at the right time, with the necessary parts at hand.

Paul Tobin, Rolls-Royce, Executive Vice President – Nuclear, said: «Big Data analytics is a core competency at Rolls-Royce and the huge savings identified in the pilot period for PSEG show the true value that we can deliver for our customers.

«We developed this capability in our world-leading aerospace business, where customers benefit from our monitoring and mining of the enormous data volumes continuously generated by aircraft engines. This allows us to achieve reductions in operating costs while improving reliability.

«We’re now applying the same know-how, coupled with our worldwide nuclear operating data and expertise, to deliver high value solutions for the nuclear power generation industry.»

Paul Davison, PSEG Engineering Vice President, said: «This agreement represents a continuation of PSEG’s efforts to focus our resources on efficiently maintaining high levels of equipment reliability by performing the right work at the right time. We are looking to build on the success of our pilot with Rolls-Royce to make even further equipment reliability improvements.»

Rolls-Royce will have employees embedded with PSEG so that the two organizations can work closely together to use Rolls-Royce’s demand-driven forecasting data. This approach will reduce overall preventive maintenance, improve equipment reliability and provide a reduction in material consumption, leading to overall reduced costs for PSEG.