Take care of these BFP pain-points to avoid destructive operational impact

We need to talk about Boiler-feed pumps' operational pain-points

For thermal power plants, Boiler-feed water pumps (BFP) play a critical role, pumping feed water from de-aerator through HP heaters to the boiler. Few trends have dictated the enhancement of BFPs such as

  • Increase in capacity of equipment for power generation, such as steam turbines.
  • Adapting to higher temperature and pressures
  • Flexible generation requirements imposed by the grid.


Boiler-feed pump for power plant operations

Trending operational painpoints

Based on our team's years of experience engaging with power plant customers, these are some of significant pain-points that are often mentioned:

  • High maintenance costs due to continuous 24/7 operations where often, small issues such as lubrication escalates into bigger issues that warrant lengthy maintenance downtime and costs. Prime examples will be leakages, high oil temperatures and cavitation.

    Secondly, lack of specialised pump expertise and failure to follow the pump's operations & maintenance manual leads to improper practices leading to suction strainer choking.
     
  • Partial load operation due to flexible generation requirements which cause a host of issues due to dated infrastructure design leading to accelerated pump component damages and a reduction of NPSHr.

    One other common reason would be incompatible design, where design margins were too big, imposed at multiple levels by pump OEM and EPC during plant design phase.
     
  • High energy costs as inefficient BFPs can consume up to 4% of the plant's energy output.

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Sulzer engineers rectifying pumps on-site

The impact on your operations and...preventive measures

Implications can be dire as potentially, losses in millions could be accumulated for just a day of outage. Plant operators have a couple of options to tackle such issues.

First of which is to conduct an initial pump inspection and analysis through a certified pump specialist which Sulzer is well qualified to provide. The health check looks at more than 20 set of operating parameters. A more in-depth study will be made on individual pump systems where required inclusive of the entire pump design-setup to identify root-cause and remedy.

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A pump inspection and analysis provide opportunities on thorough re-assessment on health of the pump