PLANT TO CONTROL ROOM
OMNIFLEX MONITORING PROVIDES SASOL VISIBILITY OF ELECTRONIC PRECIPITATORS
When Sasol’ s Secunda powerplant in South Africa was looking for ways to improve productivity and maintenance responsiveness, it approached remote monitoring experts Omniflex for real-time monitoring of electrostatic precipitators( ESPs) across 17 substations. Omniflex provided hardware solutions and consultancy to enable full visibility and data flow to the control room, improving operational efficiency, reducing downtime and modernising ESP oversight.
Sasol’ s Secunda is one of the largest synthetic fuel plants, with 136 electrostatic precipitators, a form of electrostatically charged plates, distributed across large multi-storey boiler buildings across its East and West Plants. Electrostatic precipitators are used to remove dust from flue gas in coal-fired steam generation.
The challenge
When boilers burn coal, there is a need to get rid of the ash that is forced into the electrostatic fields of the precipitators. The electrostatic precipitator panels charge wires inside the precipitators, inciting polarity in the ash passing through and causing it to be attracted to the plates of the precipitators.
The plates shake periodically to dislodge the ash before it is then collected. If these are not working properly, the ash isn’ t electrostatically charged and therefore is not removed, leading to a reduction in boiler output to prevent producing too many emissions, production losses, and ultimately inefficient activity.
To address this, Sasol identified the need for alarm equipment to alert the control room when the panels were full. Typically, to investigate if the panels were full of ash, Sasol personnel had to do manual inspections across the 17 substations to identify if there were any issues, a time-consuming process. In addition, an inability to remotely detect faults slowed maintenance and reduced ESP time.
14 AUTOMATION, CONTROL & ENGINEERING