The visible consequences of sulfuric acid aerosol emissions—opaque stack emissions called "blue plumes"—are merely the tip of an iceberg. In sufficient concentration, SO3 also can increase corrosion and fouling of…
O&M
Technical articles on all aspects of power plant operation, preventive and predictive maintenance, planned and unplanned outages
Most combustion turbine owners and operators hope that replacement parts will simply duplicate the performance and reliability of the original. That's not good enough for Eastern Technical Services (www.etspower.com), which…
EMISSIONS CONTROL Control pollution and slagging on a shoestring A patented twist on an old technique, flue gas recirculation (FGR), helps prevent slagging in the upper furnace and convective pass.…
Hyperbolic cooling towers remove heat from power plant condensers using natural draft. Air rises through the center of the tower, and hot water is discharged as a spray in the…
The objective of a root cause analysis (RCA) is to identify what happened, why it happened, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. RCA entails examining…
Good quality benchmarking data are hard to come by unless you are part of an organization like the EUCG (www.eucg.org) or write a big check to a consulting firm that…
SYSTEM RELIABILITY The critical subset Some of the most interesting reliability standards are also the ones getting the most attention as we approach the transition to mandatory compliance and enforcement this…
Water hammer—or hydraulic shock —is an apt description of the sudden impact of a mass of fast-moving water on a piping component such as a valve or an elbow. It…
Hazardous areas exist in every power plant. Following proper design rules and anticipating how the plant will be operated can avoid creating mixtures of gases that could explode or catch…
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) have elbowed their way into the nation’s lexicon with the rise in concern over climate change. But few of the journalists who are hyping global…