PE Volume 114 Issue 7

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In the mid-1980s the power industry experienced high energy piping (HEP) system failures that resulted in personnel injuries and fatalities, as well as damaged equipment and loss of power generation. Power industry leaders worked together with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Materials Property Council (MPC) to study HEP failures, to understand the causes and to develop resources for avoiding future failures.

Many power plants and other industrial facilities utilize open recirculating cooling systems equipped with cooling towers for heat transfer from condensers and other heat exchangers. Cooling towers commonly sit well away from the main plant, and it is often possible to forget about them until something goes awry. This article outlines the fundamentals of heat transfer in a cooling tower and important issues for maximizing heat exchange.

There are numerous coal energy conversion project feasibility studies performed under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) which include capital cost estimates. The estimates are developed by engineering firms that often use “installation factors” which multiply the price of the equipment to yield the total installed cost. The best known installation factors were created by Lang in 1947 and Hand in the 1960s. Although these types of factors have been updated for escalation, they have not been adjusted to reflect the current practice of building “dressed equipment.”

Temperature control is a big deal in Pittsburg, Texas, where summer afternoons average in the mid-90s and frequently top 100. At AEP/SWEPCO’s J. Robert Welsh Power Plant, however, the problem didn’t lie in the outside temperature, but in controlling the reheat temperature. The pneumatic actuators on the attemperator valves couldn’t smoothly control the valves at low levels, slamming back and forth between 10 percent open and fully closed.