When it comes to commercial power generation, cogeneration (combined heat and power) or operating packaged boilers for process steam production, the recovery and storage of condensate plays an important role in overall operational cost and efficiency.
In addition to its energy content, condensate has real value in that every gallon recovered spares the cost ofadditional makeup water, makeup water treatment and discharge to municipal or other systems. Depending on your plant configuration the condenser hotwell, main condensate storage and/or overflow tanks provide the means to manage condensate inventory and, subsequently, make-up water requirements.
Magnetrol® has produced an applications brochure for the power and utilities industries, detailing measurement challenges and solutions for each step of the steam generation and condensate recovery processes. This blog post is part of an occasional series exploring each application in detail.
Level Measurement Challenges and Consideration
Reliable and accurate point/continuous level technologies are critical in these applications to ensure sufficient supply of treated water is available to meet steam production demands as well as protect expensive hardware. Waste heat recovery through the use of flash steam also presents challenges related to level control. Oftentimes, it is the instrumentation, or lack thereof, that limits the performance of the overall system, causing the condensate and waste heat recovery processes to fall short of financial expectations.
LEVEL MEASUREMENT SOLUTIONS
Magnetrol has produced several level measurement solutions for condensate storage tanks:
Models B10 or B15 displacer-actuated switches
Eclipse® Model 706 guided wave radar transmitter; Pulsar® R96 pulse burst radar transmitter; Echotel® Model 355 non-contact ultrasonic level transmitter
Atlas™ or Aurora® magnetic level indicators