Singapore has always been synonymous with progress. Upon becoming independent in 1965, the Asian island nation adopted “Majulah Singapura,” the Malay for “Onward Singapore,” as its motto and national anthem. Its forward-looking mantra has manifested in spectacular fashion: The city-state sits on the top rung of the world’s prosperity, human development, and innovation indices.
So it was always unlikely that GE Vernova’s Global Repair Service Center in Singapore, a sprawling facility on the island’s western tip that also services the world’s fastest-growing fleet of GE Vernova H-class heavy-duty gas turbines, would be content with life as a local repair shop. When it received $60 million of investment in 2019, the service center said it was aiming to be a center of excellence in the global energy industry.
And it’s quickly making good on that mission. The repair hub, which has recently implemented various lean and smart approaches to transform its shop floor into a well-oiled, agile machine, is now set to roll out cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Drawing on a steady stream of investments, it is expected to soon fully implement an automated inspection system (AIS), which aims to help almost double output on one of its lean repair lines, enhance the work of its human experts, and contribute to the quality, durability, and safety of the H-class turbines operated by GE Vernova’s customers.
Dominic Ang, GE Vernova’s managing director for the plant, says that the smart shop floor can help GE Vernova to better serve operators of the high-efficiency, air-cooled “HA” turbine, whose ranks are rapidly growing. “We are now a beacon for the industry,” he explains. “We will track all of our efforts digitally, use cutting-edge technology to find the best way of doing things, measure all the various cycles, and then improve again,” he adds. “This is digital lean in action.”
“Gas is going to play an incredibly important role this decade, and our gas turbine installed base is growing rapidly in Asia, the largest region in the world,” said Ramesh Singaram, president and CEO for Asia at GE Vernova Gas Power, who attended a ceremony in the city-state on Monday, where an extra $20 million investment was announced. Singaram added that the plant is expected to be a constant source of “new and groundbreaking technologies to help meet our HA fleets and repair demands, expected to ramp up in 2026 and beyond.”
Building In Intelligence
The 36,000-square-meter (387,000-square-foot) plant has drawn itself firmly on the global energy map. In mid-2023, it gained the capability to repair a key part of the HA turbine: its rotor, the fast-whirling shaft that sucks air into the turbine’s combustion section and spins the generator. That was a game changer for GE Vernova’s customers in fast-growing Asian markets, who now have a great service option right at their doorstep. Around the same time, GE Vernova’s engineers chalked off their 100th repair and delivery of hot gas path components, the array of nozzles, seals, shrouds, and buckets in the H-class family that are frequently exposed to temperatures of more than 1,300 degrees Celsius (2,400 Fahrenheit) and are prone to degradation.
As the plant beefed up its capability to reflect GE Vernova’s belief in the future of gas, it also upped its shop floor game. It harnessed lean management, a system of incremental gains and marginal improvements, which has helped to ensure that the new era of HA repairs will be as safe and efficient as possible. For example, engineers reduced their toil by rearranging their various workstations and stands into a U-shaped conveyor belt and using special pneumatic elevators to winch components into place. They have also set up offices on the shop floor that allow employees to continually share ideas about streamlining operations.
The plant has also transformed itself into a “smart shop” over the past five years, says Ang, with the facility rolling out touchscreens, scanners, and digital vouchering initiatives, which have eliminated printers, paperwork, and manual processes from the shop floor. “We also wanted to build in intelligence right from the beginning when we receive our customers’ products,” explains the executive.
The logical place to inject some more extra-smartness was the plant’s special booths where automated machines inspect and fix a wide range of hot gas path components. The robots were already harnessing 3D Bluelight dimensional inspection, a technique that accurately analyzes the contours of parts, allowing the robots to polish, coat, and weld with higher precision.
So engineers began developing powerful, cloud-based computer vision algorithms that scour the high-definition Bluelight images, looking for opportunities to improve. Now, if it finds an anomaly, the AI can alert a human operator for further analysis and expert diagnosis. “It’s been trained on our proprietary dimensions and materials, so it will know if a certain part doesn’t look right,” says Ang.
It wasn’t long before engineers were presenting their creation to the facility’s main outside investor and longtime supporter, the Singapore Economic Development Board. “When they saw our futuristic technology, they got excited,” says Ang. “They wanted to extend their collaboration with us, helping us to bring this technology home and help the Global Repair Service Center in Singapore achieve global beacon status.”
The ability of the algorithms to immediately zero in on repair opportunities can cut down the time of diagnosis from several hours to just a matter of minutes, estimates Ang. He says the AIS is expected to help the center more than double its annual output, a remarkable achievement.
The Long Game
The AI-enhanced repairs can also be a boon for power producers, since the faster processing times can support better operation reliability with the H-class stalwarts, reducing costly downtime. But the AIS is not just a troubleshooter. Its algorithms will also analyze the images to infer patterns about the condition of hot gas path components, which allows for valuable insights about the ways that power producers around the world use their turbines. “We’ll better understand how our products function in different parts of the world, whether they’re in the desert or on the coast,” says Ang. “That will help us innovate to make our products last longer, help our customers to produce more power, and prepare for a future when more of them will ask for hydrogen capability.”
The rollout of AI is not expected to have any direct impact on the service center's human workforce. In fact, quite the reverse. The Singapore-based facility intends to add around 100 new technical experts in the next few years, says Ang, taking its total workforce to approximately 600 people. That’s a huge increase from 2019, when the center employed around 250 technical experts. “Operators are also expected to upskill, with manual fitters becoming machine operators, and so on,” says Ang.
In the meantime, the plant is cementing its status as a global beacon. “We’re now reading across our best practices to GE Vernova’s other service centers. Together with other global centers of excellence and strong engineering technology centers, the Singapore facility is better positioned to serve our customers in Asia, the Middle East, and beyond,” says Ang. Given the big ambitions of the Southeast Asian nation, this may just be the beginning of the Singapore center’s story.