<p>Modern coal burning power plant now encounters increased variability in the demand for power generation. This is due to the increasing penetration of renewable energy generation sources, and fluctuations of the oil and gas prices. The varying demands result in intermittent under-capacity operation (cycling) of power plants. The resulting transient due to cycling causes increased damage and reduction in the component life. In this paper we analyze the impact of cycling on a rotary Ljungstrom air preheater (AHT) unit installed at a coal fire power plant in the US. Inefficient air preheater can significantly impact boiler performance. Due to the repeated boiler’s hot-cold start, the AHT experience fluctuating operating conditions which result in accelerated degradation mechanisms such as ﻿dew-point corrosion, fouling/deposition plugging, and air heater leakage. The analysis utilizes field data for AHT basket replacement, and the number of cycles experienced by the boiler to model the remaining useful life of the baskets. The data-driven model enables preventive maintenance strategies for the AHT by predicting how long the AHT baskets will last in a probabilistic sense. The analysis showed that increase in cycling for a fixed operation time can reduce the AHT basket remaining useful life by about 30 %.</p>

Data Driven Approach for Analyzing the Impact of Power Plant Cycling on Air Preheater Degradation and Remaining Useful Life

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/GT/GT2021/volume/84898

Turbo Expo 2021

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.