Exeeco puts on a show at new British Energy training centre

Rotork intelligent valve actuators took centre stage at the recent official opening of a new skills and maintenance training centre at the British Energy Heysham power station.

The million pound investment at Heysham was opened by local MP Geraldine Smith, who praised British Energy for its commitment to training and investment in staff at all levels. The new facility will give individual workshop and classroom training for maintenance and engineering personnel at Heysham 1 and 2 stations, provided by a dedicated training team.

As an integral part of the facility, Rotork is supplying valve actuator training rigs to enable key skills such as valve commissioning, maintenance and fault finding to be practiced. Valve actuators play an important role in power station control systems, with hundreds of Rotork products - including IQ Pro actuators featuring the latest 'non-intrusive' communication, data logging and predictive valve maintenance technologies - installed throughout British Energy's nine power stations.

To assist in the management of all of its valve actuator assets, British Energy has a framework agreement with Rotork's specialist maintenance, repair, upgrade and technical support company Exeeco. Within the terms of the framework agreement Exeeco is supplying Rotork actuator training rigs for British Energy power stations at Hartlepool, Torness and Dungeness in addition to Heysham.

Exeeco Sales Director Ian Elliott explains: "Under our actuator framework agreement we service hundreds of actuators a year with British Energy, so when we were called upon to continue our partnering by providing training rigs for their technicians we were only too pleased since training support is a key part of our service."

For the opening ceremony at Heysham, Exeeco also set up a working product demonstration stand, enabling guests including Geraldine Smith to get "hands on" experience of Rotork's multi-task actuator technologies.

Summing up the opening of the Heysham facility, the station's training manager Tony Murfin comments: "This investment shows how seriously we take training at British Energy. These world class facilities provide realistic technical training conditions and will support all our staff's technical and integrated human performance training to reinforce the safe and reliable performance of the stations."