REDUCING MANUFACTURING LEAD TIME OF STEAM TURBINE CASING

Nagaraja T. K, Chandrashekar Shetty

Abstract: Condensing steam turbine is used in sugarcane, distillery and chemical industries for power generation. The condensing steam turbine components like casing are subjected to very high pressure and temperature during operation, so these components need to be machined very accurately. In Triveni Engineering & Industries Ltd. it is observed that the machining of steam turbine casing under manufacturing cycle time is exceeding the estimated cycle time this resulting in casings are not available for assembly on planned date. Here an effort is made to solve the above problem by reducing the manufacturing lead time using time study and standard operations methodology. The machining of steam turbine casing is carried out by split half condition called as top half & bottom half steam casing. We identified the operations like white lacquering, marking, rough top & bottom, finish top & bottom machining requires more setup time. Milling diaphragm groove, laby bore operations are carried out on conventional Horizontal boring machine and Vertical turret CNC lathe machine which requires more setup time, loading and unloading time. In this study we identified the deviations due to which the manufacturing cycle time is more than the estimated time and we established the standard operation procedure for each operation. With this we reduce the manufacturing lead time of steam turbine casing from 42 days to 30 days. This methodology reduces the non productive time of the steam turbine casing and finally we save the manufacturing cost of steam turbine.

Keywords: Reducing, manufacturing, lead time, steam turbine casing, standard operation, cycle time

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0315151