Critical Pressure Control for Turbomachinery

by | Apr 12, 2006 | Uncategorized

Jim Cahill

Jim Cahill

Chief Blogger, Social Marketing Leader

You know you need to periodically get your car’s oil changed and the lube oil system checked if you want the engine to last over the life you own your car.
It’s the same for many process manufacturers who have large, critical turbomachinery assets. These can include air and gas compressors, steam turbines, power recovery turbines, power generating equipment, etc.
Like the oil required for your car engine, lube oil skids maintain oil flow to the bearings, seals, and servo-controls on these critical turbomachinery assets. The lube oil skids must react very quickly in the event of an oil pump trip or other disturbance condition.
I spoke with Mark Coughran, an Emerson Control Performance consultant who was involved in a recent plant turnaround at a Texas Gulf coast petrochemical manufacturer.
Mark said the challenge with the lube oil skids is to maintain the oil pressure in these disturbance conditions, since the compressor or turbine will trip and the plant will lose production during the often lengthy restart procedure.
For this petrochemical manufacturer, Mark used his expertise acquired over the years of working with these skids along with Emerson’s Entech Toolkit to find the fastest stable tuning of the pressure controllers.
In this particular case, Mark estimates the cost in lost production from a single turbomachine trip dwarfs the cost of his applied expertise.
Emerson also has online Machinery Health Monitoring to predict conditions which may cause a trip and alert operators in time to avoid a trip. I’ll have more on some of the experts who help manufacturers get the most out of this monitoring in a future post.

Popular Posts

Comments

Follow Us

We invite you to follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to stay up to date on the latest news, events and innovations that will help you face and solve your toughest challenges.

Do you want to reuse or translate content?

Just post a link to the entry and send us a quick note so we can share your work. Thank you very much.

Our Global Community

Emerson Exchange 365

The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of the authors. Content published here is not read or approved by Emerson before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Emerson.

PHP Code Snippets Powered By : XYZScripts.com