Opportunity For Improving Power Plant Heat Rate

Opportunities for improving efficiency at power plants

The large scale of most power plants provides a environment in which financial justification, or payback, of attempts to improve energy consumption can be justified. Even small improvements in efficiency can yield very substantial returns. The challenge to engineering and management is to select the projects which have the best overall probability of success and can be integrated into the process with the least amount of disturbance.

One area of the steam cycle that may be a candidate for improvement is the feedwater heater. This device is essentially a shell and tube heat exchanger used to recover waste heat from the process and use it to preheat boiler feedwater. Maintaining the correct liquid level in the feedwater heater is a key element of extracting maximum performance. Magnetrol, a globally recognized leader in the development of level measurement equipment, has produced a video showing how their technology can be used in an advantageous manner to others in regulating feedwater heater liquid level and achieving maximum efficiency.