Snowy Hydro’s Murray 1 power station in Australia is to be digitally transformed with the installation of OnCare.Acoustic and Digital Health Assessments from Voith.

The two companies will create a smart hydropower plant by installing acoustic sensing equipment to monitor and protect the hydropower assets. The project includes Voith’s OnCare.Acoustic system, the IIoT platform OnCumulus data storage and Digital Health Assessments. Installation of the system will commence this month and is expected to take six months to complete.

Voith’s OnCare.Acoustic condition monitoring system helps to detect potentially serious incidents by recording sound anomalies. Plant operators will be informed about suspicious sounds, which are pre-classified in warnings and alarms to secure the reliability, availability and safety of hydropower plants 24/7. OnCare.Acoustic is based on Voith’s IIoT platform OnCumulus. Its cloud-based data storage provides capabilities for sensor data collection, cloud data aggregation, complex analytics and real-time data visualization.

With Digital Health Assessments, Voith experts analyze the power plant’s operation data at the OnPerformance.Lab (OPL) in Heidenheim, Germany. This enables condition-based decisions to optimize preventive maintenance measures and to detect malfunctions before they occur. Using the OPL Interact communication platform, customers can communicate with the OPL experts and gain further advantage with interactive reporting of the power plant.

The project will evaluate the value of Voith’s digital solutions combination in one single power plant. “By classifying the events and allocating them to specific equipment, plant operators gain further insights into their hydropower plant which increases the chance of identifying possible dangerous conditions ahead of other alarms,” said Dr. Thomas Mahnke, Global Product Manager OnCare.Acoustic at Voith Hydro.

Murray 1 hydropower plant is located in the state of New South Wales in Australia. The plant was officially opened in 1967 and contains 10 units with a capacity of 950 MW.