The Turbine Tripped. The Operator Blamed the Manufacturer. The Manufacturer Had No Proof.
This scenario is based on documented industry patterns. No client name is disclosed.
A North American service division of an industrial gas turbine manufacturer dispatches a field team to investigate an unscheduled shutdown at a combined-cycle power generation facility. The operator claims a manufacturing defect caused the failure. The manufacturer's engineers believe the failure was caused by the operator running the unit outside its design operating envelope.
The turbine's historian contains the sensor data — but it is in the operator's possession, on the operator's servers, under the operator's control. The manufacturer has no independent sealed record of what the turbine's sensors showed in the hours before the trip.
“The sensor data told the whole story. The problem was that until it was sealed, no arbitration panel would accept it as evidence.”
The operator's warranty claim is $4.1 million USD — replacement cost of the combustion section plus lost generation revenue. The manufacturer's legal team estimates a 60% probability of losing without independent sensor evidence.
Shabboo Black Box, installed on the manufacturer's field service laptop, ingests the sensor export provided by the operator at the time of investigation and runs it against the turbine's OEM design baseline. The package is sealed with a SHA-256 audit manifest at the moment of ingestion — forensically timestamped from the instant the manufacturer's team processes it.
The forensic package demonstrates that the turbine's inlet temperature and fuel-to-air ratio both exceeded design limits in the 47 minutes preceding the trip — consistent with operator misuse, not a manufacturing defect. The warranty claim is dismissed in arbitration.
If this scenario reflects a challenge your organization is navigating, we would like to speak with you.
Contact Josh Selva → jselva@noachnanitelab.com