Flow Measurement in Power Plants

0
comments

The power generation industry largely depends on feed water and hydrocarbon fuels to generate electricity. The flow of such liquids, gases, or a mixture of both must be accurately monitored to keep the entire system operating in an efficient manner. To achieve precise flow monitoring, power plants require reliable and responsive flow measurement systems to measure and verify liquid/gas flow.

There are several products available in the market like positive displacement flow meters that can be retrofitted to any flow system easily. Available in several makes and models, flow measurement products are engineered to withstand the harsh conditions in power plants.

Why Flow Measurement Products are Popular in the Power Plants?
Flow measurement products offer a number of advantages, making them a dependable solution for flow metering applications in coal fired, fuel oil and natural gas, geothermal, hydroelectric and nuclear power plants.

  • Ensure Lowest Level of Emissions – Governments of several countries proposed stringent regulatory measures to control the emission of toxic gases gas from the power plants. The use of advanced flow meters help monitor the rate of ammonia (NH3) gas injected to stack flue gas. The NH3 gas helps remove the NOx – which is harmful to the environment – from the stack gas. Thus, to ensure environmental suitability, the rate of NH3 injected can be managed to reduce NOx emission by using flow measurement systems.
  • Compatibility – Most of the flow measurement devices available in the market are flexible in terms of installation in different operation centers of a power plant. They can be easily attached on pipes made from any material, and are compatible with pipes of any diameter. Moreover, sensors of these measurement products are engineered to withstand high temperatures. Hence, they are ideal to be used with hot water and condensate pipelines.
  • Accurate Measurement of Conductive Feed Water Flow – To avoid corrosion, feed water used in power plants is purified to the highest level. The high purification level makes the feed water an electrical insulator. This makes it difficult for an electromagnetic meter to measure the flow of the feed water. However, there are ultrasonic flow measurement meters available in the market that accurately measure the flow of feed water regardless of their electrical conductivity.

Besides the aforementioned benefits, flow measurement products are associated with several other advantages, making them ideal for fuel & product custody transfer, simple totalizing, rate of flow, batching, blending, and dosing. Choosing the right model of flow meters provides accurate flow measurement over a wide flow range. They can measure pulsating or steady state flow and are suitable for turbulent flow. Moreover, they can be easily and quickly installed on existing pipelines for measuring the flow of non-conductive liquids and all hydrocarbon based liquids.

Leave a reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>