scottschwieger – Combined Cycle Journal

501F Users Group: OEM, OOEM, vendor session recaps (2025)

What would a gas-turbine user-group meeting be without extensive participation from equipment manufacturers and solutions providers? The 501F and 501G conferences continue to demonstrate why this blend matters. User-only sessions, covered in detail here, focus on fleet experiences, common pain points, and lessons learned shared directly by owner/operators. But the meeting’s broader value emerges when […]

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501F Users Group: User session recap (2025)

501 F&G Users Group / By scottschwieger

Owner/operators of 501F and 501G gas turbines co-located at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort in Tucson, Ariz, for their 2025 conferences this past February. For those looking forward to 2026, the meetings will take place from Feb 15-20 in Norfolk, Va at the Hilton Norfolk – The Main. Sunday’s program featured social events for all attendees.

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HRSG reliability and performance takes center stage at EHF2025

HRSGs / By scottschwieger

The eleventh annual European HRSG Forum (EHF2025), held May 13–15 in Prato, Italy, drew 95 participants from 20 countries. Co-chaired by Barry Dooley of Structural Integrity and Bob Anderson of Competitive Power Resources, EHF2025 continued its mission of advancing best practices and global knowledge-sharing in combined-cycle and HRSG operations. The event, organized by Mecca Concepts

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Target repeat chemistry mistakes to stop HRSG and steam-turbine damage (Video)

CCUG, HRSGs, STUG / By scottschwieger

The International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS) opened its Power Cycle Chemistry (PCC) webinar series, with Dr. Barry Dooley presenting and David Addison moderating, outlining how repeat cycle chemistry situations (RCCS) drive the majority of chemistry-influenced failures in fossil and combined-cycle/HRSG fleets. The message was direct: failures are patterned, measurable, and

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GENERATORS: Preempting a full stator rewind

Generator Users Group, Generators / By scottschwieger

Insights into the value of a proactive approach to planning a full stator rewind to prevent costly failures and extend the operational life of the 7FH2 generator By Joe Hopfinger, ENTRUST Solutions Group The GE 7FH2 generator remains one of the most widely deployed machines in gas-fired power generation. Introduced in the mid-1990s, nearly 1,000 units have been placed

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CCJ Historical Society: Looking back from 2025

501 F&G Users Group, 7EA Users Group, 7F Users Group, Advanced GTs, Aeros, Alstom Owners Group, Best Practices, CCUG, Controls, D5-D5A Users, Frame 6, Generator Users Group, Generators, HRSGs, STUG, V Users / By scottschwieger

What your colleagues were telling CCJ subscribers five, 10, 15, and 20 years ago Five years ago The 7F Users Group and CCJ collaborated on the first virtual user-group meeting conducted as a result of the global pandemic. It was the launchpad for more than 20 online user meetings facilitated by CCJ during that challenging three-year period. The Combined

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Handling RCAs with future disputes in mind: More is better!

7F Users Group, Advanced GTs, CCUG / By scottschwieger

The need to recover quickly from plant equipment failure is often at odds with the patient, methodical steps required to conduct a root cause analysis (RCA) that will be accepted by all parties to a potential dispute among stakeholders down the road. Stakeholders may include plant staff, owner/operator, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), insurance companies, component suppliers, third-party operation and maintenance (O&M) service providers,

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Offline diagnostics keep big generators honest

Generators / By scottschwieger

At the 2025 CIGRE International Symposium in Montréal, Kinectrics engineers Sunny Gaidhu, Krzysztof Pyc, and Ashfak Shaikh presented a practical message for powerplant owner/operators based on the paper, “Comprehensive Off-line Diagnostic Testing and Visual Inspections for High-Voltage Turbo Generators.” Offline diagnostic testing and visual inspections remain a high-value tool for large turbo generators in combined-cycle service. The paper

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Machine learning for power plant managers

CCUG / By scottschwieger

Primex is an established provider of mission-critical information for power plant managers. Stewart Nicholson, the founder, believes Primex’s machine learning (ML) technology represents a step-change improvement in timeliness, precision, and confidence over traditional performance information systems. “The service helps managers make better decisions and make them sooner,” he concludes. In their webinar series, viewable here, Primex shares

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Practical fixes to steady HRSG performance

HRSGs / By scottschwieger

Calls to the CCJ editorial office from Tucker York, SVI Bremco’s acoustical engineering guru, are always welcome. This outage season success story comes from a combined-cycle plant with chronic maintenance issues with the “egg-crate” turning vane weldment located in the HRSG transition duct immediately downstream of its 120-MW gas turbine. Over time, vane and support modifications intended to tame aerodynamic loading led to recurring weld

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