Informatics Publishing Limited

V. Saravanan ¹, K. Subbiramani ¹, M. Janardhana ¹

Affiliations
1 Central Power Research Institute, Bengaluru – 560012, Karnataka, IN

Abstract

The Indian coals are having 25 to 45% ash content and huge quantity of fly ash is being generated every day in the Indian thermal power plants. The fly ash so generated are being disposed by dry or wet mode from the power plant. The fly ash disposed in dry mode is lifted by the cement manufacturers and the fly ash disposed in wet mode is unattended. Most of the quantity of fly ash is collected in the ESPs. The particle size of fly ash collected in ESPs is finer compared to the fly ash collected in other parts of the power plant. For this reason the cement manufacturers prefer the fly ash from ESPs. The quantity of fly ash collected in the ESPs is not directly measurable on everyday basis as there are no well proven instrumental methods. Also the quantity of fly ash collected in ESPs fluctuates every day due to the varying load factor and coal quality. However, it is important to estimate the quantity of fly ash collected by ESPs on everyday basis so that the proportion of fly ash lifted by the cement manufacturers and the fly ash sent to the ash pond will be known. Presently power plants do not have a method to estimate the exact availability of fly ash and it is being theoretically calculated from the design value that the 80% of the total ash is fly ash and in that a fixed proportion (about 70% of total fly ash generated) is collected in the ESPs. However, the actual generation of fly ash would be different and this is influenced by the type of coal used, fineness of the input coal particles, boiler operating conditions, load factor, age of the power plant, etc. This uncertainty leads to disputes between cement manufacturers and the utility if there is a penalty clause in the agreement for not completely lifting the available fly ash (as theoretically calculated by the utility). In view of this it is imperative to formulate acceptable methods for determining the actual quantity of fly ash collected in the ESPs on daily basis. In the present work, a simple methodology was developed to quantity the average fly ash collected in ESPs in a 210 MWe coal fired power plant on every day basis through site measurements and routine power plant data. The amount of fly ash disposed in dry and wet mode has also been estimated through this method.

Keywords

: Ash Disposal in Power Plants, Fly Ash, Cement Plants, Coal based Power Plants.

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