HRSG Condition Assessments Identify CAPEX, Maintenance Priorities

As combined cycle gas turbine plants are called upon to play a larger and more flexible role in the generation mix, it’s important to schedule a comprehensive assessment of major components at key intervals to ensure reliable operation.

Just like humans, power plants can benefit from regularly scheduled condition assessments, which are sometimes called “health assessments” or “health checks.” That’s especially true when you’ve got a plant with a new type of equipment or when equipment has been used in ways it wasn’t originally designed for.

The North American combined cycle fleet is a good example, and though turbines get most of the attention, heat recovery steam generators (HRSGs) also feel the effects of stressful performance. Using experience drawn from many projects across the fleet as a way to demonstrate the common challenges these systems face, this article sheds light on some of the most common problems HRSGs are likely to exhibit when they hit the 10-year mark.

While varying in scope, the goal of HRSG assessments is to go beyond routine repairs and confront both short-term and long-term issues. These assessments provide an owner/operator with the proper due diligence for major maintenance planning and capital expenditures and are used in a variety of ways, including:

• Five-year capital planning on major equipment
• Five-year major maintenance planning
• Development of outage and non-outage preventive maintenance actions and work orders
• Development of new operator rounds and checks
• Modification or creation of new predictive maintenance monitoring

The full article was published in POWER MAGAZINE and can be found here. 

For more information about HRSG Condition Assessments contact Dave Moelling dave.moelling@tetra-eng.com (Americas) or James Malloy james.malloy@tetra-eng.com (EMEA).