Balance Of Plant (BOP) Solutions
Inadequate or failing balance of plant systems can severely disrupt plant availability and performance.
Maintaining your plant while ensuring it operates at peak efficiency requires attending to more than your boiler and turbine. With enhanced control and monitoring of balance of plant operations, you can reduce forced outages and derates as well as improve overall plant heat rate.
Working with Emerson, you can gain greater insight inefficient BOP systems and failing plant assets and take corrective actions before they impact your operation.
Cooling towers are critical to plant operation, but they are often under-automated and periodically monitored due to the high cost of implementing a continuous-monitoring system. Improving control strategies and implementing wireless automation, you can maintain reliable operations with better condenser cooling to maximize turbine output.
Without responsive controls that account for cycling, coal plants will typically operate SCRs and FGDs sub-optimally. An SCR, for example, may experience inadequate temperature control and increased ammonia slip. These consequences can result in damaging ammonia salts downstream or emission of ammonium chloride or gaseous ammonia—along with regulator fines and penalties. Updating control strategies and automation equipment, particularly critical flow technologies will ensure the unit operates efficiently regardless of cycling.
Your staff usually performs routine, manual inspections of the plant’s electrical equipment. It is those times in between inspections that a plant is at risk. Catastrophic consequences can occur from poor contact, loosening connection, wear/tear, corrosion, and humidity. Deploying a continuous monitoring strategy for electrical condition monitoring will mitigate these risks and eliminate the need for time-consuming manual inspections.
Problems with pumps can force a derate or even take a plant offline. Understanding when there is a problem before this occurs is the key to better plant availability. Unfortunately, studying overall vibration provides little to no warning about equipment damage or impending failure. Installing a continuous monitoring system with PeakVue technology gives automated diagnostic alerts in your control system and advanced warning of developing problems, all without the need for vibration analysis experience.