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Power Industry Process News
News Release from: Elga Process Water | Subject: Grain refurbishment
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 14 September 2007
Elga Process Water gives Isle of Grain a
makeover
E.ON recently appointed Elga Process Water to refurbish the 30 year-old boiler make-up water treatment plant at their Isle of Grain based Power Station
E.ON is the UK's largest integrated energy company, generating electricity in a fleet of power stations fuelled by gas, wind, coal, oil and hydro, enabling the company to meet its generation needs whilst balancing potential environmental impact Grain, as the station on the eponymous island is known, has two oil fired 690MW units giving a total generation capacity of 1,380MW
This article was originally published on Processingtalk on 17 Dec 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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The high purity water that the boilers need is supplied by an ion exchange plant installed in 1976.
The plant consists of two streams of cation exchange, anion exchange and mixed bed polishing, each capable of delivering up to 400 m3/h of boiler make-up water of conductivity 0.04uS/cm and silica at 0.02mg/l.
The three metre diameter vessels are fabricated from carbon steel and lined with rubber to protect them from the acidic conditions inside.
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The plant was designed and built by Permutit, a company with a long track record in power station water treatment, and now part of Elga Process Water.
Pete Kingbrooks, the Grain Plant Chemist, planned the refurbishment for this last summer.
"Between May and September the demand for electricity is lower and the station output is reduced", he says: "That means we can run with only one of our ion exchange streams available, so we can carry out planned maintenance on the other".
Two of the vessels, the cation and mixed bed exchange units, were scheduled for precautionary re-lining, and the Elga Process Water task was to remove the ion exchange resins to a temporary store, clean and re-line the vessels with rubber, spark test to ensure the integrity of the lining, reload the resins, hydraulically test and re-commission the units.
Pete also decided to replace the internal underdrain nozzles, which are made of polypropylene and tend to become brittle with age.
"If a single nozzle breaks it results in a loss of resin and contamination of the treated water", says Pete.
"That means an emergency shut down of the water treatment plant and, if that happens in winter, we lose generation capacity".
It made sense to fit new nozzles while the units were being refurbished, and this was made easier for Elga Process Water because they still keep the original Permutit design drawings in their archives.
E.ON was impressed with the Elga Process Water service and management of the site work and has awarded the company a contract to carry out a similar refurbishment on the second Grain stream in July 2008.
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