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HTT markets
ISOMEMBRANEŽ, which has an impressive track record of
successful air in-leakage control solutions. If you have a
challenge that you are interested in looking at from a new
perspective, please give us a call.
In 1998, the HTT crew spent time talking to whoever they could find that would share the hot buttons of the power industry with them. They trekked to trade shows, boiler outages, public utility headquarters and Belle Acres, a Charlotte, North Carolina hotbed of industry knowledge. They asked a lot of questions and they spent a lot of time listening. Certain trends became apparent:
Reliability and Availability are at the top of the list.
Power can only be sold if plants can be run. It doesn't matter
if your plant can run on a nice spring day, it has to be able to
run on what was supposed to be a nice spring day and proves,
suddenly, to be a blizzard instead. Those are the days when
power, immediately available to the grid, can make a
company's stock price soar. Operators must be constantly
prepared for those swings.
Efficiency is up there, too. If 80% of the cost of power is fuel, then burning all of it as efficiently as possible becomes increasingly important. In the past, fuel costs were a direct pass through. Those days are gone. Today, operators' performance is being assessed based upon the cost of BTU's at the bar.
Environmental Constraints continue to pose everyday
challenges. Lots of attention is directed to air quality related
environmental issues. There are many dimensions to this
challenge, not the least of which is our government's reluctance
to develop and articulate a comprehensive national energy
policy. That aside, we have achieved some surprisingly positive
results in opacity reduction and combustion improvement by the
relatively low cost approach of improving sealing of boiler
settings, ducts and flues. Reducing mass gas flows to original
design values frequently allows existing collection equipment to
perform as predicted and adequate oxygen in the furnace will
complete combustion where intended.
We don't mean to oversimplify. We have, however, frequently seen solution plans that seem to "fire over the head" of the problem. Commonly used testing schemes and universally installed monitoring instrumentation frequently do not accurately reflect actual operating conditions. There is no "silver bullet" solution, but properly designed and implemented testing programs, targeted sealing, adjusted fuel/oxygen distribution and re-testing to validate, will give decision makers the opportunity to have a solid base point upon which to develop further action, if any proves necessary. |