Economic Benefits of Economic Benefits of UpTime EarlyUpTime Early Fault Fault Detection Detection

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Economic Benefits of UpTime

Economic Benefits of UpTime Early Fault Detection:

Increased Generation Improved Efficiency Reduced Losses Introduction
Faced with deregulation, increasing retail competition and pressures to keep boilers online, many coalfired power generating stations have adopted business strategies centered on increasing unit availability, reliability and increasing the operational life of critical equipment. However, boiler tube failures continue to be the number one cause of forced outages in fossil plants today. These costly forced outages are responsible for an estimated six percent overall loss of unit availability.1

Annual loss of generation revenue for a 645 MW coal plant can exceed $650,000. ClearView Monitoring Solutions, Ltd. has developed leading edge early fault detection software to provide owner/operators of coal units unprecedented insight into their boilers beyond the traditional distributed control system (DCS). Operators can consider UpTime as insurance, protecting their plant against significant lost revenue. Table 12 shows the age of the fleet of coal-fired power plants in the United States. More than 75% of these plants are more than 30 years old.
Table 1: Age of U.S. Coal Plants Year Built # of Total Plants Capacity 20002004 15 1,837 MW 19951999 27 4,524 MW 19901994 67 8,638 MW 19851989 104 23,577 MW 19801984 119 55,887 MW 19751979 126 55,845 MW 19701974 136 66,334 MW 19651969 166 42,142 MW 19601964 162 25,240 MW 19551959 221 29,568 MW 19501954 234 18,674 MW 19401949 111 3,194 MW 19301939 20 132 MW 19211929 14 87 MW 2005 Power Production 8,649 GWh 26,465 GWh 57,831 GWh 158,594 GWh 368,744 GWh 364,872 GWh 397,062 GWh 245,121 GWh 142,300 GWh 159,378 GWh 88,613 GWh 8,006 GWh 365 GWh 182 GWh

1 Chris Harley, Senior Applications Engineer, Conforma Clad, Advanced Erosion Protection Technology for Steam Boiler Tubes, Power Engineering, August 2006. 2 Energy Information Administration (EAI), Existing Electric Generating Units in the United States, 2005.

Note: This report was originally written by Insyst Intelligent Systems, Ltd., all copyrights and intellectual property are now the property of ClearView Monitoring Solutions, Ltd.

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Economic Benefits of UpTime

These plants are highly susceptible to expensive boiler leaks and equipment failures. In a report to the California legislature in 2003, the California Public Utilities Commission found that the most common causes of outages and lost capacity in power plants are boiler-related problems such as boiler tube leaks. Plant age may be a contributing factor since the majority of the plants in California using boilers are at least 30 years old.3

Boiler Leaks Economic Impact

Given the large number of coal-fired plants more than 30 years old, boiler-related failures figure prominently in the plant business models. Table 24 highlights the massive economic losses associated with boiler leaks at coal plants in the United States.
Unit Table 2: Cost of Boiler Tube Leaks at Coal Plants Forced Outages Total Lost (per Unit-Year or per Event) Generation
3.18 1.99 2.76 3.38 2.94 2.98 2.25 2.14 290,876 98,769 128,606 101,521 56,065 36,871 20,439 8,559 236.86 119.39 184.68 196.98 168.99 164.38 147.49 138.82 Hr/ Day/ Event Event 74.48 3.10 59.99 2.50 66.91 2.79 58.28 2.43 57.48 2.39 55.16 2.30 65.55 2.73 64.87 2.70 MWh/ Event 91,470 49,633 46,596 30,036 19,070 12,373 9,084 4,000 Per Event $4,573,522 $2,481,633 $2,329,819 $1,501,790 $953,486 $618,641 $454,200 $199,977

10% Lost Generation

20% Lost Generation

Per Unit-Year $2,908,760 $987,690 $1,286,060 $1,015,210 $560,650 $368,710 $204,390 $85,590

Size (MW) #/UY MWh/UY Hr/UY 1000 800999 600799 400599 300399 200299 100199 1 99

Per Per Event Per/ Per Event Unit-Year Unit-Year $14,543,800 $457,352 $1,454,380 $914,704 $4,938,450 $248,163 $493,845 $496,327 $6,430,300 $232,982 $643,030 $465,964 $5,076,050 $150,179 $507,605 $300,358 $2,803,250 $95,349 $280,325 $190,697 $1,843,550 $61,864 $184,355 $123,728 $1,021,950 $45,420 $102,195 $90,840 $427,950 $19,998 $42,795 $39,995

Operators can reduce economic loss due to forced outages by addressing latent boiler problems detected early. The last four columns of Table 2 show the amazing reduction in lost generation revenue if the costs could have been reduced to only 10% or 20%, by mitigating the damage and reducing the repair time.

Early Fault Detection

A significant factor in determining the cost of a problem is the length of time that it existed. Unfortunately during a significant portion of this time, the problem was not even detected by the plant staff. A typical Potential Failure (P-F) curve as shown in Figure 1 illustrates this situation. This graph represents the monitoring of a single measured or calculated parameter versus time. The scale of the vertical axis shows the degree of satisfactory operation the parameter of interest, where 100% signifies normal operation and 0% indicates total failure. The horizontal axis represents time.

3 California Public Utilities Commission, Electricity Generation Power Plant Performance Program: Progress Report to the Legislature on the Implementation of Senate Bill SB 39 of the 2001-02 Second Extraordinary Section, November, 14, 2003, p. 6. 4 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Boiler Tube Leakages for Coal Plants: Forced Outages and Derates by Size of Plant.

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Economic Benefits of UpTime

Figure 1: Preventive Failure (P-F) Curve

The marked points on the P-F curve are as follows: P1 Point where UpTime generates an alarm P2 Point where an observant operator might notice degradation from normal P3 Point where the control system generates an alarm F Point of failure of the equipment or system without any corrective action If the plant staff had been alerted about the slight deterioration of this particular parameter at point P1, the successive operating period could have progressed much differently. Plant staff could have begun to monitor an impending failure, taken corrective action, planned preventive maintenance, swapped in a redundant device, or prepared for a planned shutdown.

Boiler Leaks Early Detection by UpTime

UpTime early fault detection software discovers developing equipment failures and excursions from normal plant operating conditions, hours or even days before a conventional DCS triggers alarms. This early warning capability translates into significant economic saving through less downtime, thereby enabling the generation of more revenue. UpTime can quickly and accurately locate the cause of an impending failure, allowing the plant operator or maintenance technician sufficient time to take preventive action, thus avoiding costly downtime, equipment damage, or reduced efficiency. The UpTime technology considers the relationships among hundreds of variables that reflect plant conditions. The UpTime algorithms combine mathematical principles, heuristic rules, and firstSubject to Proprietary Notice on Cover 4 of 8

Economic Benefits of UpTime principle engineering models. This real-time, statistics-driven system automatically identifies possible instrument failures and system faults by detecting when one or more of these parametric relationships are outside the normal range. This approach enables diagnosis of developing system problems before the plant DCS can identify them. UpTime correlates the readings of many instruments and uses the values to perform engineering analyses that reflect the performance and health of the equipment and process. These performance calculations include heat rate, thermodynamic efficiency, flow power, heat transfer rate, pressure difference, temperature difference, and saturation conditions. Rather than use simple univariate analysis (monitoring data versus time), ClearViews multivariate software provides a more comprehensive view into the plant equipment and systems. Figure 2 shows a typical relationship, or banana, graph that displays two parameters plotted against each other.

Figure 2: Relationship Map in Alert Mode (red background)

This graph clearly shows the red points outside the normal region of the operation for this pair of parameters (the banana). The blue trend line shows that the process is steadily moving farther away from the normal region. This warning occurs long before the UpTime-calculated statistical limits for the process have been crossed. In fact, these statistical limits are still well within any alarm set points for these two sensor measurements.

UpTime Case Study: Leak in Boiler Steam Line (Jun 2007)

This case study provides a good example of how the early detection capabilities of ClearViews UpTime warned the operators of a 560 MW, pulverized coal-fired, drum-type, balanced draft boiler of a leak long before the plants DCS. This warning provided the plant with time to locate this small leak along with the assistance of representatives from the boiler manufacturer.

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Economic Benefits of UpTime The boiler leak detection instrumentation at the plant includes sixteen acoustic monitors placed near the boiler. These monitors are special microphones that measure noise intensity in areas around the boiler. These noises include the sound of leaking of steam and water. During the night of 3 June 2007, four acoustic monitors near the top of the boiler (monitors 3, 4, 5, and 6) and one on the roof (monitor 16) began indicating high noise levels, subsequently triggering UpTime alarms. Finally by 10 June (seven days later), the intensity of these acoustic signals reached the set points of the plant control system. Figure 3 displays two cluster graphs that show the elevated readings of acoustic monitors 5 and 6 versus the unit load on 14 June.

Figure 3: Acoustic Monitors 5 and 6 vs. Unit Load

Figure 4 shows the steady increase of noise as registered on acoustic monitors 5 and 6 through the first half of June.

Figure 4: Acoustic Monitors 5 and 6 vs. Time

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Economic Benefits of UpTime During this time, UpTime triggered many alerts (lavender arrow shows the first UpTime alert for each microphone), but the plant control system was silent for several more days until the values reached the plant alarm set point of 90 dB (red arrow).The two sets of elevated readings between the two arrows (Figure 4) correspond to the concentrations of red dots in the two graphs in Figure 3. At the end of June, the representative of the boiler manufacturer discovered a small steam leak on the attemperation spray line where the steam pipes exit the building at the roof. The unit continued to operate normally through early July when a shutdown was ordered to repair the problem. Other UpTime cluster graphs verify the existence of the boiler leak. Part of the UpTime model includes a water/steam mass balance around all the boiler components. Under normal conditions the boiler circulation loop loses a small amount of water, approximately 50 metric tons per hour (t/h) due to blowdown, venting, etc. Figure 5 shows two cluster graphs of unit load versus the boiler water balance.

Figure 5: Unit Load vs. Boiler Water Balance Graph (A) in May 2007, (B) in July 2007

Although both graphs have similar shapes, the right graph (dated 9 July) shows a clear shift in the negative direction on the X-axis compared to the left graph (dated 24 May). This shift occurred because the adaptive model learned this increased leakage as the new normal condition. This shift indicates that the average net leakage from the system has slowly increased from approximately 50 t/h to 60 t/h. Because the plant control system does not calculate the mass balance on line, this information was only available from UpTime or offline calculations by the plant maintenance staff.

Conclusion
The US fleet of coal-fired power plants is aging. Under current economic conditions there are few opportunities to build new plants or significantly invest in upgraded subsystems. Boiler problems such as steam leaks are a major cause of economic loss. To increase the life of their boiler assets, power generation companies must maintain their equipment by detecting problems early before they degrade

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Economic Benefits of UpTime into catastrophes that force long shutdowns and lost revenue. ClearViews UpTime offers real value to owner/operators by enabling full utilization of assets to generate maximum revenue.

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