A power plant’s combined cycle generating station contacted Horner Salesperson Joseph Motz on Friday 12/16/22 regarding one of the Turbine Vent fan motors which had failed and was going to need to be replaced or repaired. As this motor is not accessible while the Turbine generator is running, Horner could not verify Motor dimensions for the possible replacement of the original OEM motor.
The Station had a spare fan, but it did not come with a motor. Upon inspection of the fan and Impeller in the customers storeroom, it was noted that the base could accommodate the metric frame motor but the bore of the spare impeller did not match the motor shaft dimension of the OEM motor nameplate. The customer requested that Joseph Motz join a conference call to discuss options for both repair and replacement. As the weather forecast called for extremely bitter cold conditions for the next 7 days, the customer decided to run the unit without that fan and began preparations for a local Rigging contractor to have a crane on site to pull the entire Fan unit and load onto a Horner truck on 1/03/23.
The plan was for Horner to remove the fan covers and impeller and verify dimension of the OEM fan motor and compare those to the in stock Metric frame motor Indianapolis Product sales had identified as a possible replacement. The ultimate goal was to have the fan unit back on site 1/10/23 for re-installation. Upon removal of the current fan impeller, we found the hub was a taper-lock design and had final bore of 55mm which matched the in-stock motor located in Indianapolis. Mr. Motz picked up the motor and delivered it to the Motor shop to test run. Balance was checked and the fan was completely reassembled and shipped back to the customer station on Friday 1/06/23, a full 4 days faster than the original plan.
The customer was able to have rigging contractor on site to move into place and make final connections and was extremely pleased with the outcome and the expedited delivery provided by multiple Horner Departments working together to solve this critical need. Additionally, through these actions, Horner can provide the customer an off the shelf solution to retrofit the (5) remaining turbine vent fans over the next 3 outages.
