As gencos seek to improve plant reliability and availability, many are turning to on-line condition monitoring for help. Huge advances in the capabilities of on-line diagnostics have occurred over the…
O&M
Technical articles on all aspects of power plant operation, preventive and predictive maintenance, planned and unplanned outages
Dominion Generation (DG) has installed selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems on many of the large coal-fired generating units it operates. The catalyst used has an SO2 to SO3 oxidation rate…
Flyash and condensed sulfur trioxide (SO3) are the major components of flue gas that contribute to the opacity of a coal plant’s stack emissions (stack opacity). Estimates are that 75%…
SYSTEM RELIABILITY The compliance clock is ticking Now that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has approved 82 of the initial set of 87 mandatory system reliability standards developed by…
Optimizing combustion in pulverized coal (PC)-fired boilers today is more important today than ever. It is well known that the average American PC plant is over 30 years old and…
Major failures of superheater and reheater outlet headers are relatively infrequent. But when headers do fail, repairing them may take weeks, and replacing them may take up to six months.…
Although the attention that SO3 has received has been focused on its visible emissions, the presence of SO3 also creates some serious operations and maintenance problems for back-end plant equipment,…
On October 20, 2006, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) to facilitate the acceptance of 87 reliability standards submitted by the North American…
Inspection and monitoring of underwater structures has always been a challenge for power plants with submerged cooling system structures, mainly due to those structures' inherent inaccessibility. Commercial divers and remotely…
About two years ago, Jeff Gremelspacher —then chief chemist at Cardinal Generating Station in Brilliant, Ohio—was asked to evaluate potential replacements for the chlorine gas disinfectant system serving Units 1…